GitHub Profile Analytics in Rust

A (basic) Rust-based analytics system that tracks views of my GitHub profile using a tracking pixel. Part of my journey to learn Rust.

Built with Actix-web and SQLite, this project demonstrates:

• Async Rust with Actix-web
• SQLite database interactions using SQLx
• JSON API endpoints
• Time-series data handling
• GitHub's Camo proxy logging

Originally deployed with ngrok, this server runs on localhost.

Note

This project is only a proof of concept. It is not meant to be used in production. There are few security measures in place (only allowing traffic from the Github Camo image proxy), but they are not enough to prevent abuse.

Live Stats

Live stats are displayed in JSON format through the /stats endpoint.

The /pixel.gif endpoint is used to track views of the GitHub profile.

Technical Details

• Backend: Rust with Actix-web
• Database: SQLite with SQLx
• Features:
  • Real-time view tracking
  • Time-based analytics
  • User agent analysis
  • JSON API endpoint for statistics

Environment Variables

Variable	Description	Default
DATABASE_URL	Database URL	sqlite:pulse.db
HOST	Host to bind to	0.0.0.0
PORT	Port to bind to	8080

API Usage

Endpoint	Description
/stats	Returns the current stats
/pixel.gif	Tracks views of the GitHub profile (returns a transparent 1x1 pixel)

Example response for /stats:

{
  "total_views": 1234,
  "views_today": 56,
  "views_this_week": 789,
  "views_by_user_agent": [
    {"user_agent": "github-camo", "count": 1000},
    {"user_agent": "Mozilla/5.0...", "count": 234}
  ],
  "recent_views": [
    {
      "timestamp": "2024-01-29T12:34:56Z",
      "camo_id": "d76dea84",
      "user_agent": "github-camo"
    }
  ]
}

Example headers in request for /pixel.gif:

{
  "user-agent": "github-camo (<hash>)",
  "host": "<host_url>",
  "via": "HTTP/1.1 github-camo (<hash>)",
  "x-forwarded-for": "<github-camo_url>",
  "accept-encoding": "gzip",
  "x-forwarded-proto": "https",
  "accept": "image/webp,image/avif,image/jxl,image/heic,image/heic-sequence,video/*;q=0.8,image/png,image/svg+xml,image/*;q=0.8,*/*;q=0.5",
  "accept-language": "en-US,en;q=0.9",
  "x-forwarded-host": "<host_url>",
}

Database Schema

Column	Type	Description
id	INTEGER	Primary key
ip_address	TEXT	IP address of the camo proxy
user_agent	TEXT	User agent of the request
camo_id	TEXT	Camo ID of the proxy
timestamp	DATETIME	Timestamp of the request

Potential Next Steps

• Adding rate limiting to the /pixel.gif endpoint
• Adding more analytics (geographic distribution of camo proxies, etc.)
• Adding tests (using actix-web's test utilities, creating a mock database, etc.)
• Adding authentication (using a secret key, etc.) for sites outside of GitHub