Generating Website Statistics with Piwik Web Analytics

Piwik is a web traffic utility that's used much like Google analytics for generating website analytics. The web statistics reports created by Piwik are similar to the ones created by Google Analytics. Piwik is available as an open source tool that you can download and host on your servers, which gives you full control over your information.

This tutorial will show you how to install Piwik. In this tutorial, the sample website: www.website.com will be used with the document root /var/www/website.com/web/.

1. The first thing you need to do is download Piwik onto your desktop and unzip the program. Piwik can be downloaded from http://piwik.org/latest.zip. After downloading the file, upload the folder to your document root. In this particular case, it is /var/www/website.com/web/. You will need to modify this.

2. Now you need to open a web browser and go to www.website.com/piwik to start the Piwik installation.

3. Next, open your shell. Type in and enter the commands listed in Image #1, into the command line
4. After that, you will need to refresh the Piwik page on your web browser. You should now see the welcome page of the installer. Click Next to proceed.

5. The installer will then perform a system check to make sure your computer meets all the minimum requirements. If a problem is discovered, scroll down to see the command you need to solve the problem. After entering the command to fix the problem, refresh the page. The system check should be successful this time. Click Next to continue.

6. Now you need to enter the database settings. Enter the name of your database and create a password. Do not change the table prefix (piwik_) or the MySQL server (localhost).

7. The installer will then create the database tables. Click Next to proceed.

8. Now you need to enter the user name for the Piwik administrator. You will also need to provide the password and email address of that particular user. You can set Piwik to generate reports for more than one website. For now, we are going to configure Piwik for only one website. Enter the name of the website and the URL. Piwik will then display a Javascript code for that specific web site. Copy and paste this code above the tab of all pages on your web site. Click Next.

9. The installation is now complete. Click Continue to Piwik.