You are maybe familiar with using Piwik and track visits using the Javascript code. In many cases however, using Javascript is not an option. Luckily you can also track user interactions from non Javascript devices using the Piwik Tracking API.

This tutorial will showcase examples and screenshots of Mobile app tracking using Piwik. The last section of this tutorial explains how to implementat Tracking in your existing app.

Mobile App & Desktop software statistics reports

Using Piwik to track your app usage would give interesting statistics usage such as:

• number of active users (per day, week, month, …) of my mobile or desktop app,
• how long users spend in the app,
• track which icons, buttons are clicked (or any other custom event),
• record device info, operating system,
• reports on any Custom Variables you that are relevant to your app (see examples below),
• how often is the app opened? When and how long is the app opened?
• number of new users, active users, total users,
• record errors or exception thrown

You would also access the power of the Piwik platform: Automatic Email reports (PDF, HTML), Analytics API, Historical analysis and much more.

How do I get Free Software Analytics and Mobile App tracking?

To track usage data in your existing Mobile app or Desktop app, you will need to:

1. Install Piwik the Free Software Analytics framework — if you are not already using Piwik
2. Create a new "Website" in Piwik — set the website name to your App name
3. Modify your App source code so it sends tracking data to Piwik (clicks, settings, errors, etc.) using the Tracking API
   

Implementing tracking in an App requires technical knowledge and will take a minimum of 2 hours to implement and can take up to 2 days for a complex software. Implementation depends on how much data should be tracked and how easy it is to add the tracking calls in your software source code.

Once you deploy your app or software with Piwik tracking, statistics about your software will be available in Real time. You will then access all reports such as "Top Pages", "Goal conversions", "Locations & Provider" and other standard Piwik reports.

Use case: Mobile App tracking & reporting

In this section we will showcase how we have used Software Analytics in our Piwik Mobile App to provide relevant and useful reports on our Mobile App usage. The last section of this tutorial will explain implementation steps and technical details.

Example tracking clicks and events

In Piwik Mobile, we decided to differentiate three types of pageviews: Window, Event and Exceptions.

• Window change
  Everytime the user opens a new window, we track a pageview with the url path starting with '/window'. For example '/window/statistics/show' which means the user opened the statistics window. We also generate an appropriate custom title, for example 'Statistics Show'.
• Event
  Events are actions within a window,  eg. user selects another date or changes a setting. Each event is tracked with url path starting with '/event'. For example '/event/settings/change-language' and the title 'Settings Change Language'.
• Error or exception
  If an error occurs or something unexpected happens, we track the occurred exception starting with '/exception'.
  For example '/exception/TypeError/filename/line'. This helps us identify issues users experience.

Example tracking Custom Variables

Custom Variables are extremely powerful as they let you track any custom name and value for your visitor or page views.

• In a Custom Variable with scope 'Visit', we track for example the current used Mobile App Version, the operating system including the exact version number, the used locale (language code) and the number of accounts each user created.
• In Custom Variables with scope 'Page' we track window related variables. For example in the statistics window, we track which report the user is currently viewing and which period is being used.

Example: tracking Goals in your app

Tracking Goals is a great way to track and measure your business objectives. Piwik provides many reports for each configured Goal. In our Mobile App, we created Goals with the following definitions (see screenshot):

• Create an account
  Visit a given URL (page or group of pages), Pattern contains: /account/create/success
• Click on Contact/Feedback
  Visit a given URL (page or group of pages), Pattern contains: /help/feedback
• Click on Visit settings
  Visit a given URL (page or group of pages), Pattern contains: /settings/index

Note: You only need to create the goals in the Piwik interface, tracking goals does not require code changes in your App tracking source code.

Goal reports will show the conversions, conversion rate and revenue per visit for each Country, Custom Variable, etc. You can also easily visualize how popular a specific part of your app is over time by analyzing the evolution graphs at the top of the Goal report.

Example: tracking Visit count

If you would like to populate the report "Visitors > Engagement > Visits by visit number", you can manually set the REST API parameter '_idvc'. We store this value in the user session on the phone.  The visit counter is incremented if the user starts the app again but not if the user resumes the application from background.

Example: Opt-in tracking UI

Our official Piwik Mobile application offers an opt-in feature to let users send us anonymously their clicks and usage data. Users can enable and disable the opt-in usage tracking mechanism at any time. When the users are not opt-in (which is the default) no data is sent to the Piwik server at all.

Example: Visitor Log in a Mobile Analytics use case

The Visitor Log will let you easily visualize the full set of actions for each visitor on your website. The Visitor Log shows all custom variables set to the visit, Converted goals, all Pageviews/events during the visit. It can even be used for troubleshooting a particular user of your app or software.

How do I implement tracking in my app?

In this section we will describe at a high level how to implement the source code changes required to make Tracking your app possible.

Note: If you want to use Piwik to track a mobile web app running in a web browser, you would probably want to use Javascript Tracking.

Send tracking requests to Piwik from your mobile app / desktop software

If you use the programming languages PHP or Java, it will be easy to implement tracking in your app since there is already a Tracking API client in these languages: see doc PHP & Java tracking clients.

If you use another programming language (python, ruby, etc.), you will have to enhance your source code by creating a "Piwik Tracking" class which will create requests to the Piwik Tracking API (link opens the Tracking REST API reference doc).

Updated! — Note about Python: there is a beta Tracking API client available in: http://dev.piwik.org/trac/ticket/3079 – please test and report any errors or suggestion in the ticket. We hope to include this class in Piwik core in the future.

This new class in your project will typically allow to set attributes (url, idsite, action_name, etc.) and then trigger the HTTP request to /piwik.php (the tracking API endpoint). Other areas of your code (Window manager, Click manager, etc.) would then instantiate an instance of this class, set the parameters, and then trigger the request.

This class would typically have a few functions such as:

• functions to set attributes:
• setUrl( url )
• setUserAgent( userAgent )
• setVisitorId ( id )
• etc.
• functions to use these attributes to build a HTTP request to record the visit/event
• trackPageView ( customPageTitle ) — triggers the HTTP request to /piwik.php using your favorite  programming language HTTP library / function.
• trackGoal ( idGoal)
• etc.

Creating such a class is just a suggestion (there might be better ways to do it in your environment). For inspiration, we recommend to check out the PiwikTracker PHP client documentation.

To set the parameters correctly, please head over to the Tracking API documentation: Piwik Tracking API Reference

Assign a custom unique id to each user

To make sure that all requests from a given user are sent to the right visitor in Piwik, it is highly recommended to set a unique ID to the user using your app. The parameter is called _id and must be hexadecimal string with a length of 16 characters.

In our Mobile App, we create an anonymous unique user id for each user. Here is an example of an ID generation in Javascript:

var uuid = os_name() + unique_id_of_device();
uuid += phone_model() + random_unique_id();
uuid = md5(uuid).slice(0, 16);

Other important notes

• For performance reasons, it is very important that you send the Tracking requests only after all the content is loaded in your application. User experience and speed is always more important than usage tracking!
• If you do not use "Opt-in" and track all usage by default, we highly recommend to update your App Privacy Policyto mention the fact that users will be tracked using Piwik. We highly recommend to have a setting that will let users disable this tracking if they wish.
  • If you do not provide such a setting to disable User Tracking, your app wouldn't follow industry best practises and might be considered a spyware.
• In a Mobile or Desktop app, there is not really a notion of Page URL.  Because Piwik Tracking API requires a URL, we recommend to create fake (but still useful!) URLs such as: http://myapp/menu/about-us/newsletter-add
• It is important to choose your URLs wisely, with useful names (the button being clicked, the menu label, etc.). A relevant naming scheme will make the data analysis much more useful. It will also help you to easily create Goals using URL matching.
• To record more information than the URL and Page Title, you could also use Custom Variables.

Conclusion

In this post we have explained how Piwik can be used to track Mobile App user interactions or desktop software usage. We have highlighted a few examples of useful usage statistics using the example of our own mobile application usage data. While implementing Mobile App Analytics might take a few hours of coding work, the value of aggregated usage data presented in a clean User Interface (Piwik!) is certainly worth it.

We hope that you will consider using Piwik to track usage data in your next Mobile app or Desktop software. We believe Piwik is now a reliable and effective Open Source Software Analytics Platform and we are looking forward to seeing how this technique helps you!

For any question or feedback, please leave a comment here or ask in the forums.

Happy Software & Mobile Analytics!

We are proud to announce that we have successfully built a Free Software alternative to Urchin now available! Check it out at: Piwik Server Log Import.

You can now easily import Web Server (Apache/ Nginx/IIS) Access logs in Piwik. Piwik Server log analytics is a full-featured Python script that lets you import a set of log files in a Piwik server. Some beta testers even said the Piwik log import script is easier to use than Urchin (eg. Piwik does not require any profile setup). Several Web Hosts companies who are using the script say that Piwik Log Analytics is also easier to manage than AWStats. It does not require any configuration and can be just be executed in a cron tab — or Windows scheduled task — to run on a daily basis.

Import server logs in Piwik

The script will let you import a set of log files in one website specifically, but the script can also find automatically record the data in the website in Piwik based on the URL hostname in the log. If a hostname is not found in the list of Website in Piwik, the script can also automatically create the new websites. The script is optimized and can parse and import hundreds of log lines per second. The tracking requests are made from the Python script to the REST Piwik Tracking API. The script has many options to enable tracking of search bots, track static files (JS, CSS, Images, etc.), track HTTP errors and redirects, ignore specific user agents, etc.

New to Piwik but using Urchin or AWStats

If you are currently using Urchin, AWStats or Webalizer, but are new to Piwik: we recommend you install Piwik (it only takes 5 minutes!) and then use the Python script to import logs. You will enjoy all Piwik reporting functionnality and many other features.

Analyze your Server Logs now!

We wish to warmly thank the french web hosting company AlwaysData for their great work on getting this project done under the GPL License. We also thank all of our fantastic sponsors all beta testers of the script for their reports and feedback.

• Download link
• How to update Piwik?
• List of all tickets closed: Changelog

The Piwik team has been implementing new features based on your feedback and on Professional Services requests:

• New Web Analytics reports (Loyalty and Recency reports)
• Better performance when tracking hundreds or thousands of websites
• Improved PDF/HTML reports (now including Graphs, possible to add the "All Websites" dashboard to the reports)
• Better usability (Change Dashboard layouts, Plot specified metric on graphs)

Here are some screenshots of the new features.

Loyalty report

Recency Report

Loyalty & Recency reports for Goals and Ecommerce conversions

Visitors > Overview now displays Page views, Downloads and Outlinks stats separately

PDF / HTML Reports now include Graphs! (optional)

Of course it works in all 46 languages in which Piwik is translated

 Graphs: Select the metric to plot

In Piwik 1.6 you used to only be able to see the main metric, but you can now plot several metrics at once, and compare metrics to each other.

Dashboard with Custom Columns layout

 How to change the Dashboard columns layout?

Click on "Dashboard & Widgets" (previously called "Add a Widget…").

Include the All Websites dashboard in PDF/HTML Email reports

Summary

For the full list of changes in Piwik 1.7 check out the Changelog.

Thank you to the core developers, all the beta testers, the translators & everyone who reported bugs or feature requests.

Stay tuned, we have a few very cool features coming in the next few months. Also, please consider participating in the project — did you check our T-shirts merchandising page?.

Happy Analytics!

PS: Piwik is a Free/Libre software.

We are happy to say that we have been developing a powerful, simple to use script that will analyse your webserver log files (Apache, Nginx, IIS, Akamai, etc.) and will import visits, page views in Piwik.

We hope that in the next few months, Piwik will become the best alternative to Urchin and AWStats (and others).

! UPDATE 2012, March 20th !

We have now released the beta version of the script to import and analyze server logs using Piwik.

Find all the documentation and details on the page Server Log Analytics

Piwik Features when used to Import Log files

Piwik normally uses Javascript code to track visits and pages. This new script will also make it easy to track visits by importing one or many web server log files in Piwik. This is useful if you are not able to add the JS code to the websites, or if you wish to import large amount of historical data at once, or if you are looking for a software that does the same thing as Urchin, AWStats, Webanalyzer or Webtrends.

Some features of the Piwik Log Import script include:

• Great performance, we have tested to track several millions of log lines per day with success. See Piwik for high traffic check list.
• Bot traffic is automatically excluded: to keep your Web Analytics report clean and useful, and increased performance.
• Piwik can track websites with the standard Javascript code, and other websites could be tracked by importing the access logs. For example Javascript tagging for website 1 and 3, and Log import for site 2 and 4. We expect these hybrid Piwik servers to become a common configuration among the community.
• File downloads appearing in the logs will be automatically tracked as "Downloads" in Piwik
• Because Logs will be imported via the Tracking API, all Piwik features will be supported (Goal tracking based on URL, IP Anonymization, Visitor log, etc.)
• Some reports will have no data because the log data is more limited that data obtained via Javascript. For example: screen resolutions, Supported Browser plugins, Custom variables, Ecommerce Analytics will not work.
• This script will effectively replace Apache2Piwik, the new tool providing more features and better performance.
• In later versions we are planning to support Log reprocessing, Error code tracking, Search engine & spam Bot tracking, Feature to use the logs to enhance existing JS tracked pages, and more (based on user popularity and feedback).

This script will be written in Python and will be released under the GPL license, for Free (just like Piwik!)

Perfect for Web hosts company and Web agencies, but also for a one-off log import

The script will have 2 modes:

1. Web Host – Web Analytics Provider user
   This mode is ideal for Web hosts, where new websites are often added in the access logs, but the Piwik admin does not wish to create manually each website. The script will automatically detect the Piwik website ID to track based on the URL being parsed: it will look for any Piwik website registered with a URL or "Alias URL" set to this page view host. If a website with the hostname doesn't exist, a new website is automatically created for this URL.
   A summary is then emailed to the Piwik Super User so he/she knows which websites are automatically created by the Log import script, so you can create users or assign permissions to view these new websites.
2. Simple Log Import for one or a few websites only
   This mode is ideal if you import only a small number of websites or if you wish to control exactly in which websites requests are tracked.
   When a line contains a URL to an unknown Piwik website, Piwik will ignore all these pageviews and will report, at the end of the script execution, the list of hostnames that were not matched to any website in Piwik.
   If these unknown URLs turn out to be legitimate pageviews, you can either create a new website manually, or add an Alias URL to an existing website, so the page URLs are directly tracked in this website the next time you import similar logs.

Join the beta testing group

To be part of our beta testing group, please email us at hello@piwik.org and mention the Testing of the Urchin/Awstats log import script. Please also mention the number of websites to track, how many pages per day, and if you are willing to test the script and report bugs or feedback.

Featured sponsor: a Web Host that tracks millions of log lines with Piwik

This work is sponsored by Alwaysdata, a French web hosting company. They provide Piwik as the Web Analytics package of choice, deprecating AWStats, for thousands of their users. They have been using Piwik for a few years and we are finally integrating this Log Import Analytics key feature in Piwik, and ensuring good performance for the script. We want to make it easy for Web hosts and large Web Agencies to use it as their Web Analytics platform.

Goodbye Urchin + Scale of Google Analytics in 2012

The Google Analytics team have decided to focus on the privately hosted Google Analytics (GA) service and discontinue the Log Analysis version (Urchin). At Piwik we are quite simply amazed at the scale and reach of Google Analytics in 2012: GA is used by over 55% of all Internet websites (source). At least 15 million websites use Google Analytics! (source). In comparison Piwik is used on 1% of the Internet (cheers!) and 250k+ websites.

Million of pings (page views) are tracked by GA per SECOND. It is hard to imagine such scale which would make any software developer speechless. We can only congratulate Google engineers and product designers for the work they are doing to track and aggregate so much data, while allowing to slice this data in real time across dozens of dimensions. This is an amazing technical milestone. We also hope that Google users privacy will be respected and privacy standards will improve in the future.

Regarding the end of Urchin, we at Piwik will do our best to provide to existing Urchin users a good experience to upgrade to Piwik, and try the leading Free software platform. If you are a Urchin user and would like to try Piwik, send us an email us at hello@piwik.org with your current setup. We will help and check similar functionnality is do-able with Piwik and the log import script.

Privacy & Security implications of self hosting your Web Analytics data

Ensuring the full control over your customers Log files, Piwik database are important requirements if you are a Web agency or a Web host providing web analytics to hundreds or thousands of users.

The tips in the Privacy page will help ensure that you make the changes to data collection and data retention required by your Privacy Policy. We also focus on Code security and recommend to all Piwik users to spend some time securing the Piwik server.

Piwik also an alternative to AWStats, Webalizer, : modern UI, better performance, and more!

We hope that Piwik will become the leading alternative to Urchin and to AWStats. AWStats was a great tool but we hope to modernize the Log analysis open source software world and make use of all the great Piwik features and capabilities in terms of data analysis and graphing. Users in 2012 and beyond will need a modern interface to access the data gathered from their Web server Access logs.

We expect a release in 1-2 months. Stay tuned…

Happy Log files import with Piwik!

Everyone loves stickers, you can use 'em to jazz up your car, laptop, books or even lamp posts! Therefore, we would love to offer beautiful Piwik stickers to the community.

So, we are launching a Design Contest to come up with a funky design that we will use to print stickers!

** Update: March, 13th 2012 **

Thank you to everybody who submitted their designs for the sticker contest.

We have now selected the top 3 sticker designs which will be used and soon available on the site.

Congratulations to the winners: Stevy Georgiadi, Jason McIntire, Michal Predotka

We are still open to submissions for great sticker designs, so please submit your design by email. If you are chosen, we will send you a $137 bounty gift by Paypal.

Which is your favorite that you'd like to see on a Piwik sticker?

Contest & Sticker Design guidelines

• Themes: we would prefer if the sticker included at least the Piwik logo or stylised Piwik text. Otherwise, you can get creative! As an idea, you could add in text about related topics such as: Open source web analytics,  Data privacy & protection, private cloud, Freedom, open data, real time analytics, etc. You are free to design how you like!
  
• Shape: sticker designs can contain transparency and can be of any shape: oval, rectangular or square
• Sizes: maximum reasonable size for a sticker would be around 10*6 centimeters. Small stickers are also possible, up to you. We will do our best to find the right sticker printing company to print the winning designs
• Duration: we will award prizes for the first 5 winning designs! Piwik team will pick the winning designs, but we will also post them on this page and listen to community feedback :)

YOU COULD WIN!!

The prize for the winning sticker design is $137 for each design we end up printing on stickers – payment by Paypal. You will also get free stickers with your design(s) shipped to your preferred address wherever you are in the world so you can show your cool design off to your friends!

The stickers will then be available in the Piwik shop for the smallest price possible: we want all Piwik users to enjoy and put their stickers wherever they like.

Submit your logo designs

Send your designs to design@piwik.org in png or jpg format, with a max width of 1200 pixels.

We hope to receive many cool sticker design submissions, and will update this page with the best ones in the next few days.

Happy designing!

Thanks so much for your submission.
There was a lot of competition, we have chosen others for the top 3,
but thank you for your design! We hope you enjoy Piwik,
All the best

Piwik team

Order your very own Piwik t-shirt or hoodie here:

About the T-shirts

ooShirts.com is a reputable Custom T-shirts company, dedicated to providing a great service and products. The T-shirt quality is great (we have tested many washes and it still looks good!). Also, the shirts comply to standards of Fair labor, which is very important to us. Shipping anywhere in the world is just $5 USD. More details on the tshirts page.

Other Piwik news!

We are currently working on the next version of Piwik with some of the new features already in SVN: new reports in Piwik, graphs in PDF reports, cool new features in the user interface: we hope to release Piwik 1.7 in a few weeks time, so stay tuned!

We are also working on posting new content on the Piwik blog and will publish a "How to" series. The tutorial series will for example explain: how to track various pages and sections of a website effectively, how to track facebook activity, how to track clicks on slideshows… and more! We will use a Piwik community member site, divezone.net scuba diving guide, holidays… as an example and show how to track and analyse relevant user interactions on your website!

If you have any suggestions or request for tutorials, how to, please submit us your ideas.

Thank you for your support & we hope you enjoy wearing your Piwik gears!

We are happy to announce that Piwik is ranked #2 in the top of web analytics tools in Germany. A total of 13% of German websites .de that are using an analytics tool have chosen the open source alternative Piwik.

To celebrate this amazing news, we would like to invite the Piwik community to meet for our first meetup in Munich, Germany!

Location: Mannhardtstrasse 6, 80538 Munich - Map & address
Date: Oct 22nd, afternoon from 2pm
Cost: Free!
Register now on the event page

We would love to see you there for an afternoon of talks, fun, meeting other Piwik community users and core team members. We also hope to discuss the roadmap and generate new ideas and suggestions to improve Piwik.  Please register on the event page for a free ticket (limited to 25 seats).

More info: Piwik ranked #2 Web Analytics tool in Germany

Piwik is ranked #13 worldwide with a global marketshare of 1.5%. Piwik is the most popular open source software and the only Free software to have a significant marketshare. However in Germany Piwik has 13% marketshare in Web Analytics tools, which is an incredible achievement!!

Below is the screenshot of Web analytics Germany marketshare (Source W3techs)

Germany is leading Privacy issues awareness with open political discussions and decisions. In particular, internet businesses with servers in foreign countries are restricted in the way they collect Personally Identifiable Information (PII) from German visitors. Piwik has become a building block of the Free Internet and Open data movement. We believe that user privacy should always be protected, and more websites will make use of open source technologies to keep control over this sensitive data. Work is always ongoing to make Piwik better and faster. We also hope to keep developing our active community on the forums and organise more meetups in the future.

Piwik meetup: Munich, Saturday October 22nd

Germany is the most represented country in the Piwik community, and half of the core dev team is German. So we are excited to meet community members and meet other Piwik users in Munich! We will announce the agenda (all talks will be in German language) in a few days on the event page. Food and drinks will be provided.

Click here to register quickly, limited entries (first come first served).

For any questions or feedback about the meetup, please contact us at hello@piwik.org. Thank you to Mayflower for hosting the meetup.

We hope to see you there!

Thomas, Stefan, Timo, Peter and André
Piwik team

Updated: Piwik slides can now be found below!

Piwik Roadmap 2.0 – Oct 2011, by Timo Besenreuther

Piwik Roadmap 2.0 – October 2011

Piwik Mobile Overview – Oct 2011, by Thomas Steur

Piwik Mobile Overview – October 2011

In particular, we are planning to work on a website redesign for piwik.org website, which contains the various documentations, FAQs, the download counter, Participate in the project, and many other pages.

What are your ideas on the website redesign? What look and feel should it have, etc.

Please leave your best suggestions/ constructive feedback, in a comment in this blog post, or in the Facebook fan page, or RT & Reply to us. Thank you to all for leaving your ideas!

Happy life & analytics,
Piwik team

While tracking and reporting ecommerce data is hard, it is equally hard to implement ecommerce analytics tags on your web site. Just think about the integration – each product page, shopping cart page, confirmation page needs specialized tags, which hook into data (e.g. price, quantity, tax, shipping, etc). And this is not taking into account Javascript 'add to cart' functions, returns, and other features!

We pride ourselves on making Piwik INCREDIBLY simple to install, setup, and use. We also want to make the process of implementing ecommerce tracking even simpler. To this end, we are working closely with the folks from Jirafe to implement plugins in ecommerce platforms (such as Magento, Prestashop, etc.) that automate setting up tags in all of the right places, and to create a hosted service so that there is an automated registration, installation, setup, and reporting inside of the ecommerce platform.

We are really excited about the potential developments here. By using an open source tool like Piwik, with our huge community to help provide feedback on plugins on various platforms, we have a truly unique way to bring enterprise level reporting to all ecommerce businesses, big and small.

If you run an ecommerce store, and would like to participate in a beta of a hosted Piwik service for ecommerce platforms, please fill in your details below.

→ Sign Up For Ecommerce Analytics

Click HERE for the newer version!

Note: Apache2Piwik described below is deprecated: we recommend using import_logs.py (click for more info!)

Apache2Piwik, a script written in Python under GPL license, enables exporting statistics from Apache logs to Piwik!

Log files are known to contain a wealth of information about activity on a website, and are usually analyzed with tools such as AWStats or Webalizer. Being able to transfer it to Piwik, a powerful web analysis tool, can greatly enhance data mining and presentation. This, in turn, means more control over your web property, better informed decisions and greater potential for optimalization.

Importing visits, pages, Goal conversions from logs is very fast, processing thousands of log lines per second and can also read & process your log files in real time. Piwik reports after import have a few missing data points compared to the standard Javascript code and standard Piwik reports. However, compared to older log analyser softwares such as Webalizer or AWStats, Piwik reports are sharp, easy to understand, and lets you focus on your analysis goals!

This page contains the following sections: Apache2Piwik requirements, How to use guide, List of missing reports when using log files, Performance of the script, and Credits.

Apache2Piwik Requirements

• access to Piwik installation
• access to Apache logs with read privileges (you can specify log format in settings.py)
• Python 2.6 with MySQLdb, GeoIP for Python and httpagentparser

How to import Apache logs in Piwik?

Follow these steps for a test export with Apache2Piwik:

• Important: create backup of your Piwik MySQL Database.
• create `settings.py` as a copy of settings.py.sample and edit MySQL Piwik Database configuration
• execute apache2piwik.py – see examples below

Example 1 – importing log file, all settings set in settings.py file:

$ python2.6 ./apache2piwik.py
Started processing /path/to/file/logfile1 file...
Finished in 2m16s.
Started processing /path/to/file/logfile2 file...
Finished in 2m59s.


$ python2.6 ./apache2piwik.py start

$ python2.6 ./apache2piwik.py stop

$ python apache2piwik.py -g

• Images files are automatically ignored. You can customize ignored extensions in settings.py file. You can also ignore specific logs with regular expressions there
• Search bots are not excluded at this stage. We might add a feature to exclude bots in a future version.
• When you import data in the past, or when you want to reprocess your reports from the logs, you can delete piwik_archive_* tables. See more information in this FAQ.
• Apache2Piwik imports data into the idsite specified in settings.py. You can override this by "-i [idsite]" command line parameter

Reporting differences between Server Logs and Javascript code