Locally hosted Piwik a replacement for Google Analytics

Looking at this article on Slashdot led me to an open source version of Google Analytics namely Piwik.

Installation of Piwik is very easy and It has a WordPress Module, WP-Piwik so integration into a WP blog isn’t too difficult. Another benefit is you get a stats page integrated into your WordPress Administration Area which saves having to log in to GA.

For high traffic sites it pays to run a cron job to automatically compile the stats every night.

I found the piwik archive.sh file located under ${piwik_web_root}/misc/cron/ required an edit because it searched for and couldn’t find the php5 binary in $PATH on my Dreamhost webhosting account:

# comment this default out
# PHP_BIN=`which php5 2>/dev/null`
 
# hard code the path to the php5 binary
PHP_BIN=/usr/local/php5/bin/php