pagerite/docs/analytics.md

Analytics

Server-side visit analytics built on a raw access-log-style event store. Data lives in a plain JSON file — a msgspec Struct dumped to disk — separate from the kanta content database, path from PAGERITE_ANALYTICS (default: analytics.json in the per-site data directory, e.g. localhost/analytics.json).

• pagerite/analytics.py — data model (Analytics, Get, Msg, Client, Favicon), the Store (raw log + atomic JSON persistence) and Store.display(), where all classification happens.
• pagerite/pages.py — records every served document as one raw GET line (_record_get, in pagerite/tracking.py) with its true HTTP status.
• pagerite/tracking.py — the /_ws activity WebSocket, and WebSocket /_api/ws/analytics (admin-gated like every /_api endpoint).
• frontend/src/pagerite.js — the client activity channel and the 📊 pen.
• frontend/src/AnalyticsView.vue — viewer component rendered inside the normal site layout on the /_a analytics page.
• frontend/src/analytics-main.js — page entry that mounts AnalyticsView into #analytics-app inside #main.

Raw records

The store is deliberately close to an access log: two append-only lists plus shared metadata. Nothing is classified when recorded — whether a client turns out to be a reader, a crawler or a scanner is decided by Store.display() from the raw events, so the stored data survives any future change to the classification rules.

Each Get record (one per served document):

• t — timestamp of the request,
• path — full request path, query string included (e.g. /.env?x=1),
• status — the true HTTP status of the response (200, or 404 for a category placeholder or a missing page),
• ref — external https origin of the Referer, "" for direct/internal (same-origin referers are dropped by the recorder),
• pre — true for idle-time link preloads from pagerite.js (x-pagerite-preload header): never counted as a view, crawler hit or abuse — recorded only so a navigation later served from the in-memory page cache (which issues no GET at all) can be attributed this GET's status,
• client — 6-byte blake3 hash referencing Analytics.clients.

304 revalidation responses return before recording and are not logged.

Each Msg record (one per pagerite.js activity message over /_ws):

• t — timestamp,
• client — 6-byte blake3 hash referencing Analytics.clients,
• fr — path of the page the activity happened on ("" for the initial load),
• to — navigation target (validated at record time: internal slug path or external https URL; anything else is dropped — sanitation, not classification),
• read — active seconds spent on fr since the previous report.

Each Client record (shared by every event, keyed by hash):

• ip — visitor IP address (first X-Forwarded-For hop, or direct peer),
• host — reverse-DNS host name for ip when resolvable, else "",
• lang — first Accept-Language tag, lowercased (e.g. "en-us"),
• country — two-letter country code. Initially derived from the Accept-Language region subtag, but overwritten by the DB-IP MMDB result when a database is available,
• city — city name from the DB-IP MMDB lookup, when available,
• ua — raw User-Agent string,
• ua_pretty — compact display form of the UA (browser/OS/device) when parsable, otherwise the raw string,
• hide — true for admin clients (hide message field): everything this client ever did is recorded but excluded from every statistic and from the viewer payload. This is the one flag set at record time — it is a client property, not a classification.

A reverse-DNS lookup is attempted for each new client and the result, when available, is stored as host; local/reserved/multicast addresses are skipped. If a DB-IP MMDB file (dbip-*.mmdb or dbip-*.mmdb.gz) is present in the working directory, it is loaded at startup and used to look up country/city. These lookups run in background tasks after the event is stored, so WebSocket message handling is never delayed. The decompressed dbip-*.mmdb file is kept in the working directory and ignored by git. The CLI flag --dbip (uv run pagerite --dbip) downloads the latest dbip-city-lite-YYYY-MM.mmdb.gz from DB-IP at startup (in the app lifespan, before the MMDB is opened), skipping the download when the local database is already current and removing older versions after an update; without the flag only an existing file is used.

What the client sends

The client (pagerite.js) keeps a WebSocket connection to /_ws for the whole browsing session and sends activity messages over it — JSON text frames matching the server's Ping msgspec struct with the fields fr (source path), to (navigation target), read (active seconds on fr since the last report) and hide; falsy fields are omitted. One channel follows the session, so the activity of a visit stays tied together, and while the user is active the accumulated reading time is flushed every few seconds: the times are incremental, so a disconnection simply leaves the last reported time in place (no close beacon). After 5 minutes without any activity the client closes the socket itself — a sleeping browser tab would lose it anyway — and the next activity reconnects; reconnects are attempted only on user activity, with an exponential backoff between attempts so a failing endpoint is never hammered. Idle-time link preloads stay plain fetch() calls so the browser may cache the responses; the WebSocket reports actual navigations and active time spent on a page.

• Initial page load: only to — the loaded path — is sent, never fr (an fr equal to to would log a bogus self-transition when a session already exists, e.g. a second tab). Reloads are not visits: the message is skipped (PerformanceNavigationTiming reload), so a refresh neither counts a second view nor logs a self-transition.
• Internal fetch-navigations: to is the target path, sent only after the swap actually happened (a failed swap falls back to a full load, whose initial message counts the view instead — no gap, no double count).
• External links (https only): to is the link's full URL. This is the exit-link record; the user may continue navigating afterwards (new tab, back), so the exit URL is not necessarily the last trail entry. Outbound links are stored by full URL so several links to the same domain remain distinct.
• Excluded: back/forward (popstate) navigations, navigating to the analytics page (/_a — its GET is untracked, and the server cannot record it as a navigation target anyway), and everything while the user has the editor open (body.editing). Admin noise, not visits. Navigating away from /_a does report.
• Admins: when SSO is in use and the session is known to be an admin, the client still reports but adds hide. The activity is recorded as usual (navigations and all), but the hide flag is set on the client record — so it covers everything that client ever did, including the time before the login. Hidden clients never appear in the viewer payload: Store.display() drops their events and metadata, and computes every aggregate (site visits, page views, transitions) from the visible visits only, so nothing needs to be reversed or redacted. With no auth proxy (dev/test) "admin" is everyone's state, so hide stays 0 and everything is recorded.
• External-site favicons: for every external https origin seen as a GET referer or an exit link, the server fetches {origin}/favicon.ico in a background task (httpx, 8 s timeout, ≤ 64 KB, image content-types only — SVG is sniffed from the body when served without an image type) and stores the icon content-hashed on disk in the FileStore (served at /_f/{name}, extension matching the actual MIME). The origin → file name mapping is recorded in Analytics.favicons (Favicon.file/fetched); misses are recorded too and retried only after 7 days. Fetches are scheduled after each activity message and once at startup, which backfills icons for already-recorded data. The viewer payload carries favicons (origin → /_f/... path), and the viewer shows the icon wherever an external site is mentioned: referer/exit trail links in the visit table and the source/exit pills of the transition map (UTM-attributed source nodes without an https origin stay text-only).

Display-time classification

Store.display(in_menu) derives the viewer payload from the raw events on every (debounced) broadcast — O(n log n) over the log, cheap enough for a small CMS. in_menu(path) resolves a path against the current menu (passed in from tracking.py, which owns the content database import) so 404 responses for real menu nodes — category placeholders — are not mistaken for misses.

• Visits and sessions: a client's messages are grouped into visits chronologically; a new visit starts after 30 minutes of inactivity (_SESSION_GAP). A fresh page load with an already-open visit (second tab) extends it, logging a (direct) transition. The visit's trail holds first-seen targets in order; read updates accumulate active seconds on the trail item matching fr. Each trail item's HTTP status comes from the client's latest GET for that path — preloads included, which is what allows 404 pages to render red in the viewer even when the navigation itself was served from the page cache. The entry page's referer and utm_* tags come from the GET that loaded it (within 10 s before the first message).
• Crawler hits: a document GET no activity message matched within _CRAWLER_TIMEOUT (10 s) is a crawler hit — plain bots that only fetch documents never register as visits. JS-running crawlers (Googlebot, GoogleOther, Applebot, ...) do connect and send messages, but their UA gives them away (_is_bot_ua): their messages are ignored at display time, so their GETs never match and land in the crawler list too. Real- browser bots whose UA does not match are caught by engagement: a visit whose total reported reading time is under 5 seconds (_MIN_VISIT_READ; durations are client-provided and trusted — such bots report 0–2 s) is reclassified as crawler hits, one per internal trail page, and counts in no visit aggregate. No source-IP verification is done: a spoofed bot UA merely lands in the crawler stats, and scanners that probe telltale paths are caught by the abuse rules regardless. In the viewer, crawler hits are grouped by client hash and shown as a trail of pages, preceded by the referer when there is one (rendered with its favicon like visit referers). The crawler table lists the most recent crawler first, with the most active as a tie-breaker.
• Abuse (scanner) hits: a 404 on a telltale path — an empty URL segment (//foo — no real client generates those), any segment starting with a dot (/.env, /.git/config) or ending in .php — classifies the source IP as abuse, and ten plain 404s within one hour (_ABUSE_404_WINDOW) on paths that don't resolve to a menu node do too. Two exemptions keep legitimate traffic out: RFC 8615 well-known URIs (/.well-known/… — browsers and services probe them, e.g. Chrome's devtools fetch of appspecific/com.chrome.devtools.json) are never telltale and never count toward the threshold, and category placeholders return 404 but are real menu nodes, so they never count either. The window keeps a long-time reader's slowly accumulating misses from ever crossing the threshold — scanners spray in bursts. Hidden (admin) clients never trigger classification: editing means visiting not-found pages, since that is where the create pen lives. Once an IP is classified, all its document GETs are shown in the abuse list — including any that arrived before classification, since the raw log keeps everything — and its activity messages are ignored. In the viewer, abuse hits are grouped by IP (never by client/UA — scanners randomize theirs) in a separate "Abuse" table, split by the recorded status: the 404 probes ("paths abused" — flagged paths that triggered classification first, then other 404s, shown verbatim with query strings) versus the real articles the abuser actually read ("articles read" — the 200 document GETs, rendered as trail links like the visitor and crawler tables, query string stripped). Raw User-Agent strings are shown one per line with their occurrence counts, and the full lists are click-to-copy.

In the visitor and crawler tables, internal paths that returned a 404 status are shown in red and the link title includes the status code, so it is easy to tell misses from real pages at a glance.

Derived shapes (the viewer payload)

The Display payload contains the derived visits, crawlers and abuse rows (structs Visit/Nav/TrailItem, CrawlerHit, AbuseHit — display DTOs only, never persisted), the visible clients, the fetched favicons, and the aggregates below.

Each derived Visit:

• start — timestamp of the first activity,
• entry — first page (path) seen,
• referer — external https origin of the entry GET, "" for direct,
• client — 6-byte blake3 hash referencing Analytics.clients,
• trail — the entry page and everything seen afterwards, keyed by the timestamp of first sight (insertion order = first-seen order). Each item holds to (page path or external exit URL), the accumulated active reading time in seconds (read) and the most recent HTTP status seen for the target (status),
• navs — every navigation (fr, to), keyed by its timestamp, repeats included. The aggregates are computed from this log,
• utm — utm_* query parameters from the landing URL, as a dict.

Each derived CrawlerHit:

• start — timestamp of the document GET,
• entry — page path requested,
• client — 6-byte blake3 hash referencing Analytics.clients,
• referer — external https origin of the request, "" for direct/none,
• query — raw query string of the request,
• status — HTTP status of the served response (200 for a real page, 404 for a category placeholder or missing page).

Each derived AbuseHit:

• start — timestamp of the request,
• path — full request path including the query string,
• client — 6-byte blake3 hash referencing Analytics.clients,
• flag — true for the paths that triggered abuse classification (telltale paths, or the 404 that crossed the threshold),
• is_404 — true for 404 responses, false for real (200) document GETs.

Crawler hits are grouped by client hash in the analytics viewer; abuse hits are grouped by IP alone (resolved from the referenced Client). In the Abuse table identical requests (same path and status class) are collapsed with their counts — a path's 404 probes and its later 200 reads never merge. Within each list paths are sorted by count descending, then by their earliest hit.

Aggregates

Aggregates are not stored; they are computed at display time by Store.display() from the derived visits (entry + navs log), skipping hidden clients and short visits reclassified as crawler hits. This is what allows a client to become hidden after navigations were already logged: no counts need reversing. The computed shapes, part of the WebSocket payload (Display struct alongside visits, crawlers, abuse and clients):

• transitions: time series of page transitions, sparse nested dict from -> to -> bucket -> count with 5-minute bucketing. from is the referer origin or "(direct)" for initial loads, a page path for navigations.
• views: time series of page loads, path -> bucket -> count, sparse: only non-zero 5-minute buckets exist (bucket key is its floored ISO timestamp). Every load counts, including repeats within a visit; external exit origins are not page views and are not counted here.
• site_visits: bucket -> count of new visits started, same sparse 5-minute bucketing.

Sparseness keeps quiet sites small; dropping old data is a matter of deleting list entries (gets/msgs are plain append-only lists).

Persistence

The whole Analytics struct is JSON-encoded and written atomically (temp file + rename) on every recorded event. Traffic on a small CMS makes this cheap enough; batching can be added later without changing the format. A file written by the pre-redesign schema (stored visits/crawlers/abuse lists) is not convertible; it is renamed to analytics.json.bak-legacy and recording starts fresh.

Viewing

The 📊 pen in the banner corner (admins only, injected by pagerite.js next to the edit pens) links to /_a, the analytics page. It is a normal site page: the standard banner, navigation and footer stay in place, and the analytics content is rendered inside #main. The page itself is public, but the data stream comes from WebSocket /_api/ws/analytics, which remains admin-gated like the rest of the management API; visitors without access see the viewer with a "could not be loaded" message.

Because it is a real page, fetch-navigation handles it like any other internal link: clicking the 📊 pen (or any link to /_a) fetches the server-rendered HTML, swaps the dynamic regions and mounts the Vue analytics app in place. The range selector updates the URL hash (#week etc.) so links to a specific range can be shared. When the URL has no hash, the client derives the default from the first analytics snapshot: day if the recorded history spans less than 24 hours, otherwise week.

AnalyticsView.vue is no longer a full-screen overlay; the body.analytics-open page-chrome hiding and #/analytics/<range> hash routing have been removed.

Charts are SVG curves (Catmull-Rom over an edge-aware Gaussian — a change-point detector splits the series at traffic-level shifts, then each segment is smoothed independently with a fixed sigma chosen so N events in a single bucket peak at N events per unit. The raw series is drawn faint underneath). Values are per-unit rates — per hour on the week view (5-minute bucket counts × 12, plotted at native 5-minute resolution), per day on the month+ ranges — and the smoothing time scale follows the unit: the month+ sigmas are 24× the hourly ones. The y max is derived from the smoothed curves so single-bucket spikes don't blow up the scale, and raw spikes are clamped into the plot. Axes always start at 0 and end at a multiple of a 1-2-5 major step (max 5 labeled intervals, minor lines at fifths when integral; the minimum y-axis range is 10 so tiny values such as a single visit are not stretched to a fractional scale). The week range is aligned to Monday 00:00 UTC and overlays up to 8 previous weeks in the muted color at decreasing opacity (the current week keeps the accent color and is truncated at the current bucket, never drawing fake zeroes for the future); a compact legend inside the top right of the visits chart marks the current ISO week in accent and the overlaid past weeks as "Week M" or "Week M–N" on a muted specimen. Its x labels are weekday names centered at midday UTC, without vertical grid lines (day boundaries would be misleading in the viewer's timezone). The month view labels days the same lineless way — day numbers at noon UTC, with the month name substituted for the 1st. Month, year and all are rolling windows ending at now, aligned to UTC day boundaries at the start so the labels span the whole range; the bucket size follows the window — 6 hours up to 31 days, daily beyond — with boundary lines at months/years on the longer ranges. All uses the full data reach, but keeps at least the past 30 days (identical to the month view when the site is younger than that, bucket size included) so the chart never collapses to a tiny sliver when the site is young. Below the charts: a transition map (all pages from /_api/pages — top-level menu items on a large-radius circular arc whose bottom point is the last item (each earlier item a bit higher), connected by a top lane labeled 🏠︎ beside the home pill (50% thicker than the branch lanes, its label font and guide offset scaled along), each item's subtree fanning out below it in menu order along a large-radius circular arc that leaves heading straight down and gradually bends right, index pages without views omitted and their children promoted in their place. The submenu structure is drawn as wide branch lanes: one per path prefix with at least two visible nodes, running behind the branch's node pills as circle arcs concentric with the fan (parent levels one radius step outward, so all lanes of a group share exactly one form), each labeled with its branch slug left-aligned just past the first pill and allowed to run along the lane to its end, disappearing under later pills when long — so the lanes reflect the path structure even where index pages are omitted — opposite transition directions joined into organic tapered connections whose middle width grows logarithmically (base 2) with the daily hit rate (uncapped), connections carrying less than 1% of the total traffic pruned, as are those whose thin middle would render below ~0.8 px — fainter strands are invisible and only their wide end flares would show; beads are simulated one by one in JS (requestAnimationFrame) and flow along each edge, persisting across data reloads (emitters are keyed per edge direction and beads tracked by progress, so an unrelated count change never reshuffles them), emitted at a rate linearly proportional to the directional count with no in-flight limit, opposing directions offset onto parallel lanes. External sources and exits whose connectors are all culled by the width threshold are dropped from their rows themselves (the site's own page nodes always stay, connected or not). External sources show as a node row above the map: each visit is attributed to utm_campaign, then utm_source, then the referer origin, then any other utm_* tag, so UTM-tagged visits are grouped under their campaign/source value rather than the referer domain. A UTM source node only links to its referer when every visit carrying that tag came from the same origin. External exits are full-size nodes in a matching row centered below the map, so the site itself stays in the middle), per-page view counts, the top transitions and the 50 most recent visit trails. Data is streamed live over WebSocket /_api/ws/analytics, which pushes the latest JSON snapshot on connect and again whenever the analytics file is updated (with a small server-side debounce to avoid flooding under high traffic).