##### Open Source RWSERVE plugin

Visitor Count

Distinguish robots from humans

by Read Write Tools Sep 11, 2018

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Monitoring website traffic is important for planning and evaluation purposes. Is
the website continuing to attract new visitors or is it declining in popularity?
Has a recent campaign been successful in attracting new visitors? Is it time to
contemplate adjustments or redesign?

Heavyweight solutions such as Google Analytics go far beyond this plugin's
capabilities, but at the risk of ceding control to a third party, which may not
be acceptable to your needs.

#### Customization

This plugin is open source and can be modified or enhanced to perform tasks such
as these:

* Counting requests to two or more pages for A/B testing.
* Summarizing activity over different periods, such as hourly or weekly.
* Monitoring visitor click-paths based on the HTTP referer header.

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The plugin module is available from NPM
. Before proceeding, you should already have Node.js and RWSERVE configured and
tested.

This module should be installed on your web server in a well-defined place, so
that it can be discovered by RWSERVE. The standard place for public domain
plugins is /srv/rwserve-plugins.

cd /srv/rwserve-plugins
npm install rwserve-visitor-count

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Make the software available by declaring it in the plugins section of your
configuration file. For detailed instructions on how to do this, refer to the plugins
documentation on the Read Write Tools HTTP/2 Server website.

#### TL;DR

plugins {
    rwserve-visitor-count {
        location /srv/rwserve-plugins/node_modules/rwserve-visitor-count/dist/index.js
        config {
            save-as /var/log/rwserve/localhost.daily-counts.txt      
        }
    }
    router {
        /favicon.ico  methods=GET  plugin=rwserve-visitor-count
    }    
}

The save-as value is an absolute path to the file to be used to save the visitor
counts. Be sure to enclose this value in GRAVE-ACCENTS. The directory and file
will be created if they don't already exist. Both read and write permissions
must be allowed for the system user "rwserve".

The router only sends requests to the plugin when the HTTP method is GET and the
resource path is ``/favicon.ico`.

#### Cookbook

A full configuration file with typical settings for a server running on
localhost port 7443, is included in this NPM module at etc/visitor-count-config.
To use this configuration file, adjust these variables if they don't match your
server setup:

$PLUGIN-PATH='/srv/rwserve-plugins/node_modules/rwserve-visitor-count/dist/index.js'
$PRIVATE-KEY='/etc/pki/tls/private/localhost.key'
$CERTIFICATE='/etc/pki/tls/certs/localhost.crt'
$DOCUMENTS-PATH='/srv/rwserve/configuration-docs'
$SAVE-AS='/var/log/rwserve/localhost.daily-counts.txt'

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#### Server

Start the server using the configuration file just prepared. Use Bash to start
the server in the background, like this:

[user@host ~]# rwserve /srv/rwserve-plugins/node_modules/rwserve-visitor-count/etc/visitor-count-config &

#### Browser

Use your browser to navigate to the website's homepage, which will automatically
trigger a request for favicon.ico:

https://localhost:7443/        

#### Shutdown and Save

Finally, shut down the server using the process ID of the server. The visitor
count file will be saved during the shutdown process.

[user@host ~]# kill PID

#### Deployment

Once you've tested the plugin and are ready to go live, adjust your production
web server's configuration in /etc/rwserve/rwserve.conf and restart it using systemd
. . .

[user@host ~]# systemctl restart rwserve

. . . then monitor its request/response activity with journald`.

[user@host ~]# journalctl -u rwserve -ef

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This is a plugin for the Read Write Tools HTTP/2 Server, which works on Linux
platforms.

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The rwserve-visitor-count plugin is licensed under
the MIT License.

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