How To Install Matomo on Debian 9 Stretch

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Matomo on Debian 9 Stretch. For those of you who didn’t know, Matomo or formerly known as Piwik is an open-source web analytics application. It rivals Google Analytics and includes even more features and allows you to brand your brand and send out custom daily, weekly, and monthly reports to your clients.

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of Matomo on a Debian 9 (Stretch) server.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Debian 9 (Stretch).
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• SSH access to the server (or just open Terminal if you’re on a desktop).
• A non-root sudo user or access to the root user. We recommend acting as a non-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.

Install Matomo on Debian 9 Stretch

Step 1. Before we install any software, it’s important to make sure your system is up to date by running the following apt-get commands in the terminal:

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade

Step 2. Install LAMP (Linux, Apache, MariaDB, and PHP)  server.

A Debian 9 LAMP server is required. If you do not have LAMP installed, Please read our previous tutorial to install LAMP Server on Debian 9.

Step 3. Installing Matomo on Debian 9 Stretch.

The first thing to do is to go to Matomo’s download page and download the latest stable version of Piwik:

cd /var/www/html/
wget https://builds.matomo.org/piwik.zip

Unpack the Matomo archive to the document root directory on your server:

unzip piwik.zip

We will need to change some folders permissions:

chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html/piwik
chmod -R 0755 /var/www/html/piwik/tmp

Step 4. Configuring MariaDB for Matomo.

By default, MariaDB is not hardened. You can secure MariaDB using the mysql_secure_installation script. you should read and below each step carefully which will set a root password, remove anonymous users, disallow remote root login, and remove the test database and access to secure MariaDB:

mysql_secure_installation

Configure it like this:

- Set root password? [Y/n] y
- Remove anonymous users? [Y/n] y
- Disallow root login remotely? [Y/n] y
- Remove test database and access to it? [Y/n] y
- Reload privilege tables now? [Y/n] y

Next, we will need to log in to the MariaDB console and create a database for the Matomo. Run the following command:

mysql -u root -p

This will prompt you for a password, so enter your MariaDB root password and hit Enter. Once you are logged in to your database server you need to create a database for Matomo installation:

MariaDB [(none)]> CREATE DATABASE matomo;
MariaDB [(none)]> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON matomo.* TO 'matomo'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'PASSWORD';
MariaDB [(none)]> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
MariaDB [(none)]> \q

Step 5. Accessing Matomo web analytics application.

Matomo will be available on HTTP port 80 by default. Open your favorite browser and navigate to http://your-domain.com/piwik or http://server-ip/piwik and complete the required steps to finish the installation. If you are using a firewall, please open port 80 to enable access to the control panel.

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Matomo. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing Install Matomo open source web analytics application on the Debian 9 Stretch system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official Matomo website.