Analytics

GitHub’s traffic API gives you 14 days of view and clone data per repository. After that, it’s gone. If you want a longer historical record of how your open source projects are performing, you have to collect the data yourself before the window closes.

ghtraffic is a small Go tool that solves this problem. It queries the GitHub traffic API for every repository you have push access to – including organization repos – and writes newline-delimited JSON to stdout, one record per repo per day. Run it hourly via cron and append to a local file, and you accumulate a permanent historical record.

Both Umami and Plausible are open source, privacy-focused web analytics platforms that run in Docker, collect visitor metrics without cookies, and position themselves as GDPR-compliant alternatives to Google Analytics. I ran both simultaneously on my personal sites to decide which to keep long-term. My conclusion was Umami, and it wasn’t particularly close once I moved past surface aesthetics. The deciding factors were practical: API flexibility, navigational coherence, and–counterintuitively–Plausible’s own setup flow working against it. Plausible is marginally prettier in places, but it squanders that advantage with some genuinely puzzling navigation decisions.