This is a library for PHP to track visits on your website. My goal was to develop a visit tracker where I know exactly what data is stored and where it is stored. Also, no personal data is stored, and no cookies are used, which means you don't need a privacy policy, cookie banner and other consent that is usually required for other analytics tools in the EU.
- SQL database to store your visits
- web server to call your PHP code
Download this repository and add it to your project.
You need to create a new SQL database with two tables:
The userVisits table ...
| Name | Type | Extra |
| ------ | ----------- | -------------- |
| ID 🔑 | int(11) | AUTO_INCREMENT |
| page | varchar(64) | |
| date | date | |
| userIp | varchar(64) | |
... and the totalVisits table.
| Name | Type | Extra |
| ------ | ----------- | -------------- |
| ID 🔑 | int(11) | AUTO_INCREMENT |
| page | varchar(64) | |
| date | date | |
| visits | int(11) | |
To be able to access your database you, have to add your credentials in the config.php file.
<?php
$host_name = 'host_name'; # <-- here
$database = 'database'; # <-- here
$user_name = 'user_name'; # <-- here
$password = 'password'; # <-- here
$link = new mysqli($host_name, $user_name, $password, $database);
if ($link->connect_error) {
die('<p>Verbindung zum MySQL Server fehlgeschlagen: '. $link->connect_error .'</p>');
}To finally be able to count your visits, you need to rename your HTML files to PHP files and add the following at the top:
<?php
require('src/visit-counter.php');
VisitCounter::countVisit('example.php'); # <-- the parameter is the name of the page that will be saved in the database
?>Now that the visits are stored in your database, you can build your own API and display the data in an app, for example.
This is what a very simple API could look like that returns the daily visits to a certain page as JSON...
<?php
require("config.php");
$sql = "SELECT page, date, visits FROM totalVisits";
if ($result = mysqli_query($link, $sql)) {
$resultArray = array();
$tempArray = array();
while($row = $result->fetch_object()) {
$tempArray = $row;
array_push($resultArray, $tempArray);
}
echo json_encode($resultArray);
}
mysqli_close($link);
?>... and this is the associated output.
[
{
"page": "index.php",
"date": "2021-12-30",
"visits": "164"
},
{
"page": "kit.php",
"date": "2021-12-30",
"visits": "98"
},
{
"page": "portfolio.php",
"date": "2021-12-30",
"visits": "96"
}
]<?php
require('src/visit-counter.php');
VisitCounter::countVisit('example.php');
?>
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Page Title</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Body Heading</h1>
<p>Body paragraph.</p>
</body>
</html>This library is licensed under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for the full license.