This repo is a fork of Plausible's hosting repo,https://github.com/plausible/hosting.
It contains modifications to the original repo to make it work with Laravel Forge and Traefik. Modifications are primarily in the /reverse-proxy/traefik/docker-compose.traefik.yml file. There are a few changes in the main docker-compose.yml file to use .env for environmental variables. Using the .env file allows you to use Laravel Forge's built-in environmental variables editor. I've also removed exposing ports that were not needed when using Traefik.
The clickhouse/clickhouse-config.xml file has been modified from the original to allow the included backup scripts to work.
Here is a link to the Traefik repo used in conjunction with this repo:
https://github.com/johnfmorton/traefik-for-laravel-forge
For a complete write-up on using this repo, read Analytics a different way. Plausible Analytics on Laravel Forge with Traefik and Docker.
The repo assumes you have Docker installed already. See the johnfmorton/traefik-for-laravel-forge repo for more information.
You will need to set up DNS to point your domain name with an A record to your server you've created with Laravel Forge. For example, analytics.yourdomain.com should point to your server's IP address.
In the .env file, set BASE_URL to this domain name. For example, https://analytics.yourdomain.com. You must include the protocol, either https:// or http:// is required by Plausible for this setting.
Use the example.env for reference in setting up the additional environmental variables.
Here is a basic version of the deployment script.
cd /home/forge/analytics
git pull origin $FORGE_SITE_BRANCH
docker-compose -f docker-compose.yml -f reverse-proxy/traefik/docker-compose.traefik.yml up -d -remove-orphans
For a more complete version of the deployment script, see the forge-deployment-script.sh file in this repo.
In January 2025, I rebuilt the backup and restore scripts entirely. The new scripts are
- data-volume-backup.sh
- data-volume-restore.sh
You MUST set the following environmental variables in the .env file for the backup and restore scripts to work.
RETENTION_DAYS=7
BACKUP_DIR="/home/forge/backups"
EMAIL="your_email@example.com"
The backup script can be run from the command line, or in a cron job. The backup script will back up the Postgres and Clickhouse databases in the /backup directory.
The restore script can be run from the command line. It will restore the Postgres and Clickhouse databases from the backup files in the /backup directory. The script will look for the most recent backup files in the directory. If you want to specify a different backup file, you can pass the file name as an argument to the script.
./data-volume-restore.sh [-d database_backup_file] [-e event_data_backup_file]
I referenced and borrowed from all of the following links. I'm grateful the authors have all shared their knowledge.
- https://blog.jpat.dev/how-to-deploy-docker-applications-with-laravel-forge
- https://putyourlightson.com/articles/replacing-google-analytics-with-self-hosted-analytics
- https://plausible.io/docs/self-hosting
- https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-use-traefik-as-a-reverse-proxy-for-docker-containers-on-ubuntu-20-04
- https://macarthur.me/posts/back-up-plausible-to-bucket/
- https://plausiblebootstrapper.com/posts/back-up-plausible
- https://plausiblebootstrapper.com/posts/back-up-plausible-to-bucket
During my tests of this repo, I ran into a few issues. I would test building and deploying contains from the command line and also from with the Forge control panel. This caused my server to have a lot of containers and images. I had to remove them a few times.
I'm documenting them here in case they are helpful to others.
I pruned the networks, images and containers on my server like this.
docker network prune
docker image prune
docker container prune
At one point, I needed to stop all the containers so I could start everything again from scratch. Here's how to do that.
docker stop $(docker ps -aq)
The source code for the site is licensed under the MIT license, which you can find in the MIT-LICENSE.txt file.