pages

pages provides web application / static site hosting with built-in support for simple analytics via Prometheus and Grafana.

Motivation

As I work to reduce the number of Google services from my life, I found myself wanting a simpler alternative to my current hosting solution. Right now, my hosting is provided by GitHub pages and my analytics is provided by Google (as one did in th 2010s). But as we start to enforce more privacy rights through systems like GDPR, I find myself wanting a simpler solution that doesn't require cookie disclosures.

Quickstart with Docker

The easiest way to get started is with Docker. Your web content will be exposed on port 8080 while metrics will be available on 8081.

docker run --rm -it \
  -e PAGES_GIT_URL=<your repo> \
  -e PAGES_GIT_BRANCH=gh-pages \
  -p 8080:8080 \
  -p 8081:8081 \
  img.pitz.tech/mya/pages

Syncing the git repository

You can instruct the server to reload the Git branch by curling this /_admin/sync endpoint.

curl -X POST http://localhost:8080/_admin/sync

This endpoint is exposed publicly so your CI solution can issue the command to cause the servers to update.

Metrics

All metrics are prefixed with the pages namespace. This makes it easy to narrow down to the specific metrics for the system.

pages_page_view_count

The number of page views for a given path and their associated referrer.

# HELP pages_page_view_count page views
# TYPE pages_page_view_count counter
pages_page_view_count{country="",path="/charts/",referrer="http://localhost:8080/blog/"} 1

pages_page_session_duration

How long a user is actively engaged with the page.

https://github.com/mjpitz/pages/issues/2

# HELP pages_page_session_duration time spent on a given page in seconds
# TYPE pages_page_session_duration histogram
pages_page_session_duration{country="",path="/charts/"}