pagerite/docs/analytics.md

Analytics

Server-side visit analytics. Data lives in a plain JSON file — a msgspec Struct dumped to disk — separate from the kanta content database, path from PAGERITE_ANALYTICS (default: the database path with .kantadb replaced by .analytics.json, e.g. pagerite.analytics.json).

• pagerite/analytics.py — data model (Analytics, Client, Visit, CrawlerHit, AbuseHit) and the Store (in-memory data + session map, atomic JSON persistence).
• pagerite/app.py — entry-referer stashing in show_page (_track_entry), the POST /_a ping endpoint, and WebSocket /_api/ws/analytics (admin-gated like every /_api endpoint).
• frontend/src/pagerite.js — client navigation pings 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.

What is collected

The client (pagerite.js) POSTs fire-and-forget pings to /_a with {fr, to} (fr = source path):

• Initial page load: to is the loaded path. This ping is what starts the visit and counts the entry page view — the document GET alone records nothing, so bots and admin browsing never register. Reloads are not visits: the ping is skipped (PerformanceNavigationTiming reload), so a refresh neither counts a second view nor logs a self-transition. The GET handler stashes a cross-origin https Referer (origin part only) and any utm_* query parameters in in-memory IP tables, consumed by the ping that starts the visit; internal or absent referers never touch the referer table.
• 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 ping 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, navigation involving the analytics page itself (/_a), and everything while the user has the editor open (body.editing). Admin noise, not visits.
• Admins: when SSO is in use and the session is known to be an admin, the client still pings but adds hide=1. The server then records nothing — and if the same client session already had a visit from before logging in, that visit is removed from the JSON along with the counts recorded when it was created (site visit, entry view, entry transition). Views/transitions logged by later pings inside such a visit lack per-event timestamps and are left as-is. With no auth proxy (dev/test) "admin" is everyone's state, so hide stays 0 and everything is recorded.
• The server validates to: internal paths must be valid slug paths ("/" or [a-z0-9_-] segments), external ones are re-derived to the https origin and accepted only when the client sent exactly that.
• Client records: the visitor's IP (IPv4 or IPv6 /64 network), raw User-Agent and extracted Accept-Language tag are hashed with blake3; the first 6 bytes identify a shared Client record. The Client stores the full IP, User-Agent, compact ua_pretty, lang, initial country from the language-region subtag, and asynchronously-filled country/city from DB-IP geoip plus reverse-DNS host. Visits, crawler hits and abuse hits all reference this record by its hash, so client metadata is stored once instead of repeated per event.
• The visitor IP is stored in the Client. 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 repository root, it is loaded at startup and used to look up country/city. These lookups run in background tasks after the event is stored, so the /_a response is never delayed. The decompressed dbip-*.mmdb file is kept in the repository root 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 before the server starts, 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.
• Crawler hits: every document GET is queued in RAM as a pending crawler hit. If a ping from the same client arrives within 10 seconds the hit is discarded; otherwise it is written to crawlers. Crawlers do not count as visits or views. The Accept-Language header is stored on the shared Client immediately; reverse-DNS host names and DB-IP geoip country/city are filled in asynchronously, just like for real visits. In the analytics viewer, crawler hits are grouped by client hash and shown as a trail of internal pages that crawler visited; the crawler table lists the most active crawlers first rather than the most recent hits.
• Abuse (scanner) hits: a 404 for a telltale path — any URL segment starting with a dot (/.env, /.git/config) or ending in .php — classifies the source IP as abuse immediately, and ten plain 404s from one IP do too. Classification reclassifies history: all earlier crawler hits from that IP (persisted and pending) move to the abuse list, so a random-UA scanner no longer pollutes the crawler stats of the legitimate bot it impersonates. Once classified, every document GET and 404 from the IP is recorded as an abuse hit with the full request path (query string included), and its pings are ignored. The classified IP set (abuse_ips) is persisted in the JSON file; the plain-404 counters are RAM-only. In the viewer, abuse hits are grouped by IP (never by client/UA — scanners randomize theirs) in a separate "Abuse" table. Identical paths are collapsed into one entry with their hit count; flagged paths that triggered classification are lifted to the top, followed by other 404s and then document GETs from the abuser. Raw User-Agent strings are shown one per line with their occurrence counts, and the full lists are click-to-copy.

Visits and sessions

There are no cookies. A visit is tied together by a client hash — the first 6 bytes of a blake3 digest over the prettified IP (IPv4 unchanged, IPv6 /64 network), the raw User-Agent string and the extracted Accept-Language tag. The first ping from a client hash starts a new visit; subsequent pings extend it. Pings arriving with no known session (server restart) start a fresh visit from the first ping — treated as missing data rather than dropped. The client-hash → visit map and the IP → entry-referer/UTM tables are in-memory only; client metadata is stored in Analytics.clients keyed by the client hash.

Each Client record:

• 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.

Each Visit record:

• start — timestamp of the first event,
• entry — first page (path) seen,
• referer — external https origin of the initial load, "" for direct,
• client — 6-byte blake3 hash referencing Analytics.clients,
• trail — everything seen afterwards in first-seen order: page paths and external exit URLs. Re-visiting an already seen page (incl. the entry) does not append.
• utm — utm_* query parameters from the landing URL, as a dict.
• read — active reading time per path (seconds), keyed by path.

Each CrawlerHit record:

• 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.

Each AbuseHit record:

• start — timestamp of the request,
• path — full request path including the query string (e.g. /.env?x=1),
• client — 6-byte blake3 hash referencing Analytics.clients,
• flag — true for the path that triggered abuse classification (telltale path or the 404 that crossed the threshold),
• is_404 — true for 404 responses, false for document GETs from the abuser.

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 paths are collapsed with their counts; flagged paths that triggered classification are lifted to the top, followed by other 404s and then document GETs from the abuser. Within each category paths are sorted by count descending, then by their earliest hit.

Aggregates

• transitions: time series of page transitions, sparse nested dict from -> to -> bucket -> count with the same 5-minute bucketing as views. from is the referer origin or "(direct)" for initial loads, a page path for pings.
• 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/dict entries (visits is a plain append-only list, buckets plain keys).

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.

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 server defaults to day if analytics 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 adaptive Gaussian — a change-point detector splits the series at traffic-level shifts, then each segment is smoothed with a bandwidth that ramps with a broad pilot estimate of the local rate: isolated events stay narrow (~0.4-unit sigma, peaking at ~1 event/unit), busy traffic widens to a 1-unit sigma. 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 same accent color at decreasing opacity (the current week is truncated at the current bucket, never drawing fake zeroes for the future); 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. Year is a rolling 365-day window ending at now, re-bucketed to daily points, with boundary lines at months/years. All uses the full data reach, but keeps at least the past 30 days so the chart never collapses to a tiny sliver when the site is young. Below the charts: a radial transition map (all pages from /_api/pages — front page at the center, each slug level on its own ring, siblings clockwise in navigation order from the top, radial gap equal to the arc spacing — opposite transition directions joined into organic tapered connections whose middle width grows logarithmically with the count (a single count renders as a ~1 px line, uncapped), connections carrying less than 1% of the total traffic pruned; beads are simulated one by one in JS (requestAnimationFrame) and flow along each edge, emitted at a rate linearly proportional to the directional count with no in-flight limit, opposing directions offset onto parallel lanes. 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 small nodes fanned outwards from their source page), 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).