Self-Host Plausible Analytics with Greffon
Web analytics that does not ship your visitors to a third party. Plausible is light, privacy-friendly, and runs comfortably on a greffer. Here is the honest setup.
Most analytics tools work by sending your visitors' behaviour to someone else's servers. Plausible is the privacy-friendly alternative: lightweight, cookie-free by design, and self-hostable. Grafting it onto a greffer means the numbers about your site, and the people who generate them, stay on hardware you own.
Why own your analytics
Plausible gives you the dashboard most people actually want, top pages, sources, countries, trends, without the weight and privacy cost of the usual options. Self-hosting it adds one more property: the raw visitor data never leaves your greffer, which makes the privacy promise something you can stand behind rather than take on faith.
Graft it from the catalog
Pick Plausible from the catalog and graft it onto your greffer. Greffon issues the certificate and routes it, so the dashboard comes up over HTTPS. Plausible is genuinely light, so a small always-on greffer handles it without fuss.
Make it reachable
Analytics is the one app that has to be reachable by the open internet, because every visitor's browser loads its script and sends events to it. Tunnel mode lets the greffer serve Plausible with no inbound ports, which is the simplest path behind NAT; port forwarding with dynamic DNS works as well. The endpoint needs to be reachable over HTTPS from wherever your readers are.
Add the script to your site
Once Plausible is up, add its small script tag to your site, pointing at your own Plausible domain rather than a hosted one. From then on, traffic flows to your greffer and shows up in your dashboard. There are no cookies to consent to, which is part of why the snippet is so light.
Back up the data
Your analytics history is worth keeping. Greffon handles TLS and routing today; native one-click backups land in M2. Until then, bring your own tool (restic or borgbackup) and back up Plausible's database on a schedule so a rebuild does not lose your history.
