Tracking visitors on private website?

Community
1

Hello. I have built a private website where people from work can view work-related pictures.

The home page is really just a log in screen. And if you successfully log in, then you can navigate to various photo galleries.

I would like an easy way to track how many people visit my website, and also have some way to differentiate them (e.g. by OP address).

I have used Google in the past to track traffic on a business website, but am not sure it makes sense for this private site. Plus I don’t want to have to spend a bunch of time creating a new Google account, and so on.

Any suggestions on how I k=might track traffic and unique traffic to this private site?

By the way, this is on a web server where I have access to WHM and cPanel, so maybe that is how I track visitors?

2

How does your log in screen validate the login given to it?

3

Tracking by IP address is lovely until you get dynamic IP addresses, people using someone else’s device, terminal servers, multiple connections from the same remote site, and so on. As @m_hutley said, you have a login, so use that to track usage.

2 Likes
4

It’s a pretty wimpy log in screen…

It asks for a username and password. The username represents the client folder I am giving access to (e.g. ACME). Both username and password are hardcoded.

It is a down-and-dirty site to display photos from a party we had.

I know how to build a database -driven login, but don’t want to spend the time. So I was looking for some easy way to get a sense of who comes to check out photos.

5

True, but for my needs I just wanted an easy way to get a sense of how many checked things out.

Normally, yes, but as I just replied, there is only one set of credentials for everyone. Username = client name and password will be emailed to everyone at work.

6

You could download and install Matomo. It requires PHP + MySQL.

Installing it takes 10 minutes, configuration is minimal, no sign up is required and the analytics data stays on your server. Make sure to download the free (self-hosted) version though, not the cloud solution.

7

When the login details are successful, append (on a new line) date/time, username and password to a text file.

8

How do I create such a log file using PHP?

Would I be able to capture IP address also?

9

https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.file-put-contents.php

For the IP address:

Try logging in, view the following output and take your pick:

echo '<pre>'; // add line feeds so easier to read
print_r( $_SERVER );
echo '</pre>';

Edit:

I would also be tempted to use current date(‘y-m-d’) .‘.log’ as a file name and create the file if it does not exist.

10

This topic was automatically closed 91 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.