How To Install Piwik on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install and configure Piwik on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS server. For those of you who didn’t know, 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 Piwik web analytics on a Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus) server.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus).
• 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 Piwik on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

Step 1. First, make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date by running the following apt-get commands in the terminal.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

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

A Ubuntu 16.04 LAMP server is required. If you do not have LAMP installed, you can follow our guide here. Also, install all required PHP modules:

sudo apt-get install php7.0-curl php7.0-gd php7.0-mbstring php7.0-mysql libapache2-mod-php7.0 php7.0-mcrypt php7.0-geoip php7.0-zip

Step 3. Installing Piwik.

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

cd /var/www/html/
wget http://builds.piwik.org/latest.zip

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

unzip latest.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 Piwik.

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 Piwik. 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 Piwik installation:

CREATE DATABASE piwikdb;
CREATE USER piwikadmin@localhost IDENTIFIED BY 'mySecurepassword';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON piwik.* TO piwikadmin@localhost;
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
exit

Step 5. Accessing Piwik.

Piwik will be available on HTTP port 80 by default. Open your favorite browser and navigate to http://yourdomain.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 Piwik. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing Piwik web analytics on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS  (Xenial Xerus) system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official Piwik website.

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