Please see the installation guide for full instructions on how to install Piwik. You can access a pre-installed fast Piwik in one click for a small fee at Best Piwik Hosts
Please see the Piwik Requirements for further information.
To learn all about what it takes to install Piwik on your web server, please check out this video: How to Install Piwik Analytics [Video] .
Once Piwik is setup, check out the following video to learn about configuring Piwik settings to customize your web analytics platform: How to Setup Piwik Analytics [Video] .
Piwik only works on Mysql, where all the development and testing is done.
Supporting multiple databases is trickier than it sounds and requires much more testing, coding... therefore human resources, which are very limited. However we would welcome any patches in this area, if external developers decide to add this functionnality in Piwik. As a start, please see the Using Alternative Databases brainstorm on the wordpress wiki for more information.
Also, there is a beta non official posgresql port built by a community member, more information about Postgresql Piwik on this ticket.
Piwik requires access to a MySQL database to store your web analytics data. During the installation process you can specify an existing MySQL database for Piwik to use. If a database cannot be found, Piwik will create one for you.
To get information about your server, you can use the phpinfo() function. This will also give you more information about your Apache and PHP configuration.
Serious web hosting companies will provide the ability to enable PHP5, either via a config setting in your web host administration panel, or via a .htaccess. If you do not have a server with PHP5 and your web host doesn't support PHP5, we have partnered with high quality web hosts who provide a pre-loaded Piwik for a small fee. See the Piwik Hosting page.
If your web host supports PHP4 but hasn't enabled PHP5, it might be possible to enable it manually. Here are the most common ways to enable PHP5; create a .htaccess file in your piwik folder containing
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AddHandler php5-cgi .phpSetEnv PHP_VER 5AddType x-mapp-php5 .php
AddHandler x-mapp-php5 .php
You will need a server with PHP to run Piwik. However, the tracking code is a simple JavaScript tag, which can be added to any webpage written in Python, Jsp, ASP, .NET, etc.
For example, the same instance of Piwik can track data from a PHP website, a simple HTML website and a complex JSP application, simply by copy and pasting the JavaScript tag into the desired pages.
If you do not have a server with PHP enabled, we have partnered with high quality web hosts who provide a pre-loaded Piwik for a small fee. See the Piwik Hosting page.
Piwik works very well on the webserver Nginx indeed! To get started, check out the contributed nginx server configuration which aims to be fast, secure and flexible. Some features included in this configuration are: Referer and User Agent filtering (disabled by default), using php-cgi, php-fpm or proxying to Apache with mod_php.
Piwik is supported by Windows using IIS or Apache, and also supported on Linux and Mac.
There is also a one click installation of Piwik under Windows when using the Windows Platform Installer, see the Web App Gallery blog post for more details.
If you install Piwik, connecting through a reverse proxy (https-to-http), the following line should be automatically added to your config/config.ini.php file during the Piwik installation:[General]
assume_secure_protocol = 1
If you install Piwik from behind the reverse proxy (where Piwik can't detect https will be used), you should set the above manually.
Also, depending on your proxy server, the Visitor IP is set in a different HTTP Header which should also be automatically detected on install and added to your config/config.ini.php:
[General]
; CloudFlare proxy
; proxy_client_headers[] = HTTP_CF_CONNECTING_IP
; ISP proxy (Client-IP)
;proxy_client_headers[] = HTTP_CLIENT_IP
; standard proxy
;proxy_client_headers[] = HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR
;proxy_host_headers[] = HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR
If Piwik was unable to detect your proxy configuration, please add these lines manually in your Piwik config file.
If your server is configured behind an outgoing proxy, check out this FAQ: outgoing Proxy easy setup in Piwik.
You might also be interested in How do I force Piwik login to use SSL (https)?.
In the Piwik installation at the Database setup step, the host can be specified as:
* hostname
* IPaddress
You can specify a custom port number to connect Mysql (instead of default 3306):
* host name:port
* ipaddr:port
You can also specify to connect through a socket:
* /sock/path # anything before the slash is ignored
* localhost. # localhost has a special meaning in php 5.3+; with mysqlnd, it means use the default sock path
To force a new installation of Piwik, you can simply delete the configuration file in config/config.ini.php.
When you visit Piwik, it will trigger the Piwik installation process.
If you install Piwik specifying an existing database containing Piwik data, the installation process will automatically detect that the Piwik tables already exist. You will be able to choose to either keep your existing data, or delete the tables and start from a clean database.
To move Piwik to a new domain or subdomain,
If you want to reinstall Piwik please see How can I reinstall Piwik? Can I keep the existing data?
If you want to keep the data in your Piwik, but move the php files to another server and the data to another mysql server, you will need to:
Note that during the operation, visits will not be tracked.
By default, Piwik uses files to store session data. These files are located in the tmp/sessions folder under your Piwik directory.
Where file-based session storage may be insecure (e.g., in some shared hosting environments) or where you have to share session data between servers (e.g., load balanced web servers), you can instead use the database to store session data.
In config/config.ini.php, under the [General] section (add this section if it doesn't already exist):
session_save_handler = dbtable
Caveat: if you have many concurrent dashboard users, you may need to increase the max number of client connections to the database server.
To uninstall Piwik, follow the following steps:
Piwik will then be successfully uninstalled.
To backup Piwik:
1) Regularly backup the Mysql database containing Piwik tables (eg. using an existing Mysql backup script)
2) Regularly backup the file piwik/config/config.ini.php
To restore a Piwik backup:
1) Import the Mysql backup data in a new Mysql database you have created
2) Download the latest version of Piwik, unzip and upload
3) Copy the file config.ini.php from the backup into your new piwik setup. You might have to edit the database connection settings in the file if they have changed.
4) Visit Piwik and check that everything is working correctly!
Static image graphs in the PDF/HTML reports and Piwik Mobile app will display standard non unicode characters by default.
However if you use Piwik in languages using unicode characters (Hebrew, Arabic, Japanese, Chinese, etc.), please follow the steps below:
1) download the font unifont.ttf
2) unzip the archive on your computer
3) upload the file unifont.ttf in piwik/plugins/ImageGraph/fonts/unifont.ttf
Graphs in the Mobile app and Scheduled reports should now display all characters properly.
Note: the unifont.ttf will only be used for a set of languages (Japanese, Chinese, etc.). If you wish to use the font for all languages, upload the file unifont.ttf to: piwik/plugins/ImageGraph/fonts/tahoma.ttf overwriting the existing tahoma.ttf
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