Plausible Analytics - Privacy-Friendly Web Analytics

This is a repackaged open source software product wherein additional charges apply for cloudimg support services.

## Privacy Friendly Web Analytics You Own

Plausible Community Edition is an open source, self hosted web analytics platform designed as a lightweight alternative to Google Analytics. It measures unique visitors, page views, bounce rate, visit duration, top pages, referral sources, countries, devices and browsers, all presented on a single readable dashboard rather than behind a maze of reports. Because it is self hosted on your AWS infrastructure, analytics data stays under your control and is never shared with an advertising network.

Plausible does not use cookies and does not collect personal data or persistent identifiers, so it needs no cookie banner and no consent prompt under GDPR, CCPA or PECR. The tracking script is roughly 1 KB, a fraction of the size of conventional analytics tags, so it measures your site without slowing it down.

## Who This Is For

This image suits SaaS teams tracking product page conversions without invasive tracking, media publishers monitoring referral traffic across several properties, portals that need cookie free analytics for compliance, and marketing teams who want a clear weekly view of referral sources. Whether you handle thousands or millions of monthly page views, the ClickHouse backed architecture scales with your traffic on appropriately sized EC2 instances.

## The Complete Stack, Running On First Boot

Self hosting Plausible normally means assembling three services by hand: the Plausible application, a PostgreSQL database for dashboard and user metadata, and a ClickHouse column store for the analytics events themselves. This image ships all three, pinned and pre pulled, as a Docker Compose stack that starts automatically. There is nothing to download, configure or wire together on first boot.

The application is reachable through an nginx reverse proxy on port 80 with the WebSocket upgrade headers the live dashboard needs. PostgreSQL and ClickHouse stay entirely inside the private Docker network and are never published to a host interface, so the only ports open to the network are SSH and the dashboard itself.

## Secrets Generated Per Instance, Not Baked Into The Image

A self hosted Plausible deployment needs a SECRET_KEY_BASE, a TOTP vault key, a database password and an initial administrator. Shipping any of those inside an image would mean every customer shared them. This image ships none of them.

On first boot the instance generates its own SECRET_KEY_BASE, TOTP vault key and PostgreSQL password, resolves its own public address through EC2 instance metadata, seeds a single administrator account with a freshly generated password, and writes those details to a root owned credentials file readable only by an administrator. Open registration is disabled, so there is no public signup form on your analytics instance. The image itself is captured with the databases destroyed and the environment file removed, so no credential and no analytics data can travel from the build into your deployment.

## Dedicated Data Volume

Analytics events accumulate, and ClickHouse is where they land. The Docker data root, which holds the pinned images and every database volume, is a dedicated 60 GiB gp3 EBS volume mounted by filesystem UUID rather than a share of the operating system disk. You can grow it, snapshot it or back it up independently of the root volume, and the layout is identical on every instance launched from this image.

## Running On AWS

The image deploys on EC2 with full control over instance sizing, storage and networking, and can sit behind an Application Load Balancer with an AWS Certificate Manager certificate or behind Amazon CloudFront for TLS and a custom domain. Data volumes are standard EBS, so Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager snapshots and AWS Backup apply directly.

## Getting Started

Launch the AMI, SSH in to retrieve your generated administrator credentials, then open the dashboard in your browser and add your first site. Because EC2 bills by the second, you can evaluate on a smaller instance and terminate when you are done.

## Support

cloudimg provides 24/7 support for this image, covering deployment, configuration, updates, performance tuning and troubleshooting. Plausible Community Edition is licensed under the AGPL-3.0 and is shipped unmodified.