Analytics for Github Pages

[Artucuno]

Hey! I'm not sure if its already a thing but Github Pages should have a graph in the traffic tab of your Github Repo with the visitors count, country of origin, etc.

Thanks.

(13/09/2024) EDIT:
As of now, there is still no way to view Github pages traffic inside of your Github repo. If you are looking for a service with built-in analytics, I recommend using Cloudflare pages.

Cloudflare Pages also supports Jekyll and has automated builds from Git, so migration from Github Pages is super simple. [Comparison]

[melvincwng]

@Artucuno Hey there, I believe that feature (or at least most of it) is available in GitHub already.

You can follow the steps below:

1. Go to your code repository
2. Look for the 'Insights' tab, click on it
3. Then click on 'Traffic' tab
4. Once there, you will see a variety of metrics like visitors, how many people cloned your repo etc

Hope this answers your question 😁

[port19x]

This does not track website traffic, but repo traffic!

[sourabhshete99]

does it count our own view to our repo. I see on my repo there'e 1 unique visitor, does it mean that 1 me or somebody else ?

[jdevfullstack]

that sounds exactly like Google Analytics,

well you can use Google Analytics for GitHub Pages if you are really into it, I tried it before

[guest271314]

Is there a way to write to a file in the repository with GitHub Actions?

[port19x]

Is there a way to write to a file in the repository with GitHub Actions?

Yes. https://port19.xyz/tech/github-actions-monitoring/

[guest271314]

Then we can write the requested URLs to a file in the repository.

[port19x]

And how would that be triggered?
There is no actions trigger that you can hook into your webiste via a tracking pixel or sth similar.
Even if there was, it would be just as good/bad as google analytics and not server-side.

[guest271314]

Not sure yet. That is one part of what is required.

I've thought of using the GitHub API to write a comment in a Discussion or public Gist section to facilitate writing the request URL.

[rterakedis]

Hello,

@melvincwng - the Traffic stats at the location you specified appear to be directly related to repository traffic (https://docs.github.com/en/rest/metrics/traffic). In other words, when folks view the repository via github.com, stats are tracked.

What I would like to see (and what I think @Artucuno is asking), is a set of similar traffic stats as to what GitHub Pages (project.github.io) traffic is happening:

• Popular Content - what github.io pages are being request)
• Referring Sites - where did traffic to the GitHub Page (*.github.io/pagename.html)

My primary reason for asking this is that a tool like Google Analytics is over-engineered for these basic needs. Also, it's far less privacy-focused. I'm simply looking for equivalent-type of stats for GitHub Pages as what is provided for Github Repos.

UPDATE: I did just manage to figure out that you can get some of this type of reporting if you sign up for a free Cloudflare account and enable web analytics on cloudflare. You can read about it on the Cloudflare Blog

[acalatrava]

I agree with this proposal and I think it should be kind of mandatory. Most of us are privacy focused folks and I’d love to have, not just analytics, but direct access to logs of every request to GitHub pages, I mean server logs. We could then use any software or tool to generate analytics from them.

[joadoumie]

Just wanted to echo the sentiment in this thread that having some built-in mechanism for:

1. Server Logs
2. Web Traffic analytics (basic number of requests etc.)

Would be super useful!

[svnv-svsv-jm]

Oh yes please!

[ghost]

can I haz log?

[Artucuno]

Real

[caendesilva]

Would be nice to have something super simple, like the visitor counts for different pages. Similar to Popular content on the Traffic data, but for pages hosted on Pages.

[kirkone]

This would be very useful.
The integration in the Traffic page should be good for most usecases.

[hossainalmahdi]

Google analytics can be used instead

[caendesilva]

Three problems with that:

1. It's absolutely overkill for most small sites
2. It will slow down page loads
3. It will track users

Sure, if you need to know every little detail, go for GA, but if you like me just want some stats over which pages are most popular, and the visitor count, something small on the GitHub Pages server end would be ideal.

[brandonbrinkley]

Having the logs would be super helpful, even if user info has to be scrubbed. I'd be very interested in knowing what URLs are referring my pages.

[davidmegginson]

Bump! Like a lot of posters, I don't use Google Analytics for ethical reasons (third-party tracking scripts are nasty), but I'd love to have basic server-side traffic info — even just pageviews/day — to know how many people are visiting.

[Skipants]

@davidmegginson There are more ethical analytics tools you can use. Check out https://dataethics.eu/tools/ under "Alternative Webstatistic Tools"

[reukiodo]

Aren't those all still client-side implementations? Server stats are basically already collected, just want exposure to view them.

[caendesilva]

Aren't those all still client-side implementations? Server stats are basically already collected, just want exposure to view them.

Exactly. GitHub (presumably) already collects all the information we are interested in, we just want to see it.

[dwarfered]

Agreed, though probably no financial incentive for GitHub to add such a feature. Unless they tie it to GitHub Pro or something

[caendesilva]

Agreed, though probably no financial incentive for GitHub to add such a feature. Unless they tie it to GitHub Pro or something

On the other hand, it should not cost that much to implement the feature, and they shouldn't lose any money by offering it. Considering that GitHub Pages is free I don't think this should be a deal breaker. I'm assuming GitHub wants people to use Pages, so it should be in their interest to have as many good features as possible.

[mvaldesdeleon]

In case any product people read this: The number 1 reason that would make me churn right now is need to have insight into my site's traffic. I've deliberately chosen to not include any cookies nor 3rd party content in my site, and would have to rely solely on server logs to have this kind of insight. I can do without it for now, but eventually that'll be my reason to host somewhere else.

[allan-stewart]

Hear, hear!

[guest271314]

Seems like we can do this using a ServiceWorker, Deno Deploy or Google App Engine if Microsoft doesn't want to do it.

[davidrsch]

Hello, would you mind linking to a tutorial or demo gh-page with this solution implemented?

[guest271314]

Something like

index.html

<script type="module">
  await navigator.serviceWorker.register("./sw.js", {
    scope: "./"
  });
  navigator.serviceWorker.addEventListener("controllerchange", async (e) => {
    // Do stuff when the ServiceWorker has control of the WindowClient
    fetch(location.href, {
      method: "head"
    });
  });
</script>

sw.js

async function log(url) {
  return fetch("https://your/deno/deploy/instance", {
    method: "query",
    body: url
  }).catch((e) => {
    // Handle error or exception
  });
}

self.addEventListener("install", (event) => {
  console.log(event.type);
  event.waitUntil(self.skipWaiting());
});

self.addEventListener("activate", async (event) => {
  console.log(event.type);
  event.waitUntil(self.clients.claim());
});

self.addEventListener("fetch", async (event) => {
  event.respondWith(fetch(event.request));
  // We're not holding up content for analytics
  log(event.request.url);
});

https://docs.deno.com/deploy/kv/manual/

Opening a database

In your Deno program, you can get a reference to a KV database using Deno.openKv(). You may pass in an optional file system path to where you'd like to store your database, otherwise one will be created for you based on the current working directory of your script.

Watching for updates in Deno KV

You can also listen for updates from Deno KV with kv.watch(), which will emit a new value or values of the key or keys you provide.

...

Production usage

Deno KV is available for use in live applications on Deno Deploy. In production, Deno KV is backed by FoundationDB, the open source key-value store created by Apple.

[guest271314]

Or. log *everything*, persistently https://github.com/guest271314/persistent-serviceworker.

[alexvgjm]

No progress on this topic yet?

All the people I know who migrates from Pages is precisely because of the lack of this feature.

Nobody talks about exposing IP addresses or anything similar, but rather something as simple as counting daily visits. I found several threads about the same. What is so problematic, dangerous or complicated about this that these requests have been ignored for more than 7 years?

I guess Microsoft wants to somehow get rid of this service. If not, I don't understand why they don't provide something so seemingly basic.

[Tedpac]

Exactly, I regretted not using Cloudflare Pages from the beginning. Maybe at some point I will migrate there.

[guest271314]

Does user/repository/graphs/traffic suffice?

[port19x]

No

[guest271314]

Then there's (deliberately) no solution in Microsoft GitHub world.

[tsvibt]

Bump.

[silas-hw]

This would be super useful

[hstsethi]

I don't want to use Cloudflare as it's not privacy-friendly, just like Google analytics. Does anyone know any other solution?

I tried Netlify but it asked for legal ID. Vercel does work and it also has server side HTTP logs, but I was having trouble getting my site indexed on search engines.

Edit: My site is static and only contains HTML, CSS. I prefer not to use JS either.

[guest271314]

Deno Deploy. Make a fetch() request on loading GH Pages, store request URL in KV storage.

[port19x]

I'm using nearlyfreespeech.net for php hosting and they have a toggle for keeping logs

[Tedpac]

If you claim that Cloudflare generically is not privacy friendly, you are most probably right, because Cloudflare has too many services to analyze internet traffic, but if you mean Cloudflare Pages, which is the closest thing to GitHub Pages, but with analytics included, could you please point me to where you got the information to claim that it is not privacy friendly?

[rterakedis]

I started looking into https://umami.is/ as a posssible analytics script. No opinion to offer on it yet.

[Aqueuse]

I have tried it but it doesn't track anything :-/

[mtrocadomoreira]

I managed to set up umami with Material for Mkdocs by following the relevant section of this post. I'm using Umami Cloud's free tier, which seems pretty generous in terms of features, and I'm happy with the result so far.

[mmguero]

I would love to see this as well.

[brishtibheja]

please microsoft 🥺

[guest271314]

I bet if leo asked Microsoft would hand over the logs.

[reukiodo]

who/what is leo?

[brishtibheja]

who/what is leo?

exactly my question

[mmguero]

I assume they mean "law enforcement officers"

[Res260]

plz implement

[Sainan]

What's interesting to me is that they do clearly measure some usage data for pages, at least enough to enforce their documented bandwidth limit, so at least some way to see how close you are to hitting a limit...?

[chrissy0]

Also looking for this.

[Umbrellla777]

I think you can implement tracking using Yandex Metrica, they provide a free tracking service

[davidmegginson]

Again, the goal is to get access to the server logs (even in a heavily redacted form), not to sneak Javascript analytics spyware into people's browsers. In any case, third-party Javascript analytics are useless for measuring direct downloads of data (i.e. not by clicking a link on a web page) for measuring the large percentage of users who block third-party analytics trackers on web pages: only GitHub has access to that information.

[MaykGyver]

Came to this thread because I wanted to peek at visitor numbers. Let's alter the viewing angle!

Why do we feel, we would have the right to get those numbers? Because other services give them to us. FB. YT. Insta. And many many more.

What's the main effect when you provide visitor metrics? They become relevant. You start to think in visitors when authoring. When someone else gets to know your blog the first question becomes "how many" instead of "what's the topic". Let alone an unavoidable percentage of users with manipulated metrics to enhance some kind of market value.

MS did never answer. MS did never provide the metrics. Until that happens I will enjoy a niche of the internet, where honest content might stay more relevant than subscription numbers.

[guest271314]

@MaykGyver If metrics don't matter all of the metrics on GitHub's home page don't matter.

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Millions of developers and businesses call GitHub home

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That "55% faster" claim is clearly suspicious.

7x fastervulnerability fixes with GitHubJump to footnote 2

[guest271314]

Couldn't Microsoft Clarity https://clarity.microsoft.com/ be integrated into GitHub?

[MaykGyver]

Couldn't Microsoft Clarity https://clarity.microsoft.com/ be integrated into GitHub?

@guest271314 You're lucky! It works.

Keep in mind, that MS Clarity ist client-side tracking. So if the javascript function ist not executed by the client for any reason, the tracking won't hit. A server-side tracking would count all requests instead.

[guest271314]

Seems to me Microsoft could "integrate" their own products into GitHub.

[rterakedis]

As an FYI, there's a lot of fine print in the Clarity FAQs, particularly in the Privacy section.

[guest271314]

@rterakedis

Responsible AI

Ha, ha, ha. Too funny. Same spiel StackExchange tried to sell Our partnership with Google and commitment to socially responsible AI(https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/398127/our-partnership-with-google-and-commitment-to-socially-responsible-ai/398182#398182).

What "privacy"? There is such thing for any signal communications. Since at least ThinThread was publicly disclosed A Good American. Really since "the burglars" exposed COINTELPRO The Burglary That Exposed COINTELPRO.

It was pretty clear that we were building the most powerful analysis tool
that had been developed in history to monitor basically the entire world.

• Bill Binney, A Good American

You're dealing with Microsoft.With the analytics and with GitHub.

• Microsoft handed the NSA access to encrypted messages
• Everything you need to know about PRISM

And then named an emulator the same name!

• Prism