I recently set up Matomo to track visits to recoolit.com. Here’s how I did it.

EDIT 2023-12-06: I recently switched to self-hosted Goatcounter instead, mostly following this guide.

The setup:

Recoolit.com is hosted by Webflow
The domain is managed with Google Domains
I am running the Matomo self-hosted version on a digital ocean droplet.

The official docs are okay but contain a massive gap. Where it says “Open your web browser and navigate to the URL to which you uploaded Matomo” – this was not at all trivial for me. I used these two tutorials (1 and 2) heavily. Also, I probably forgot some steps. So if something is missing, compare to these tutorials and fill in the steps.

Configure your subdomain

As far as I understand, you need your matomo server running on a named domain rather than just your server IP address to do this, because

The Matomo tracking call uses https
To get a certificate for https, you need a named domain.

This could be wrong. But I ended up using a subdomain analytics.recoolit.com. To do this, I went to my DNS settings in Google Domains, and added a new A record from analytics -> ip address. It takes a little while to propagate, so do this first.

Install matomo

Ssh into your server and run:

# Download matomo
wget https://builds.matomo.org/matomo-latest.zip

# unzip it to the directory where the web server can run it
sudo apt install unzip
sudo unzip matomo-latest.zip -d /var/www/html
sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html/matomo


# Install some other needed packages
sudo apt install apache2
sudo apt-get install php php-curl php-gd php-cli mysql-server php-mysql php-xml php-mbstring

Prepare mysql

Matomo needs to store its data somewhere.

mysql -u root -p

And now run the setup. You’ll need this username and password when running the wizard.

CREATE DATABASE matomo;
# replace the username and password, leave the quotes, you can leave localhost
CREATE USER 'matomouser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'strong-password-goes-here';
# replace the username, and localhost if you changed it before.
GRANT SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, CREATE, DROP, ALTER, CREATE TEMPORARY TABLES, LOCK TABLES ON matomo.* TO 'matomouser'@'localhost';

Configure Apache

# create  a new configuration file for this web server
vi /etc/apache2/sites-available/matomo.conf

Add the following, replacing your email address and ServerName.

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerAdmin admin@example.com
    ServerName analytics.example.com
    DocumentRoot /var/www/html/matomo
    ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
    CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined
</VirtualHost>

Note: I make the DocumentRoot /matomo. The analytics dashboard will have a login screen that is publicly available, so this whole web server is open. Without the /matomo, you end up making an Apache file navigator visible to the public, which I didn’t want. There’s probably a smarter way to do this, though.

Now, enable that configuration, disable the default, and restart the Apache service:

sudo a2ensite matomo.conf
sudo a2dissite 000-default.conf
sudo service apache2 start

Enable HTTPS

I used the EFF’s Certbot, following the installation instructions here.

This wil create a new configuration file /etc/apache2/sites-available/matomo-le-ssl.conf. When I went through this, I had a problem where it had copied the servername and document root from matomo.conf before I corrected those. So keep an eye out.

Set up Matomo

Finally, we can go back to the official instructions and use the wizard. Go to analytics.yourdomain.com in your browser, which should open up a pretty-looking website. Follow the steps!

I had to enable two extensions, mbstring and mysqli by opening /etc/php/7.4/cli/php.ini and uncommenting lines 924 and 926. Semicolons comment out the line.

;extension=gmp
;extension=intl
;extension=imap
;extension=ldap
extension=mbstring
;extension=exif      ; Must be after mbstring as it depends on it
extension=mysqli
;extension=oci8_12c  ; Use with Oracle Database 12c Instant Client
;extension=odbc
;extension=openssl
;extension=pdo_firebird

I then had to reboot my server.

Note that there are two places you’ll be entering a username and password. The first is for Mysql, it’s the one you created earlier. The second is your login to the web interface (they call this “superuser”, I think).

When this is done, you chould be able to go to analytics.subdomain.com and log into a dashboard.

Finally, copy the tracking code into Webflow’s Custom Code tab, making sure that the URL it’s trying to pull the script from is correct. I had to adjust this line.

    var u="//analytics.subdomain.com/";

Fire up your site with dev tools open, make sure the matomo.js call resolves, and then go see your first pageview in your dashboard! (Note: if you have the do-not-track (“dnt”) header set, this won’t work.)

Setting Up Matomo