Analytics Reporter

A lightweight system for publishing analytics data from Google Analytics profiles.

Available reports are named and described in reports.json. For now, they're hardcoded into the repository.

Setup

• To run the utility on your computer, install it through npm:

npm install -g analytics-reporter

If you're developing locally inside the repo, npm install is sufficient.

• Create an API service account in the Google developer dashboard.

• Visit the "APIs" section of the Google Developer Dashboard for your project, and enable it for the "Analytics API".

• Go to the "Credentials" section and generate "service account" credentials, and download the JSON private key file it gives you.

• Take the generated client email address (ends with gserviceaccount.com) and grant it Read, Analyze & Collaborate permissions on the Google Analytics profile(s) whose data you wish to publish.

• Set environment variables for your app's generated email address, and for the profile you authorized it to:

export ANALYTICS_REPORT_EMAIL="[email protected]"
export ANALYTICS_REPORT_IDS="ga:XXXXXX"

You may wish to manage these using autoenv. If you do, there is an example.env file you can copy to .env to get started.

To find your Google Analytics view ID:

1. Sign in to your Analytics account.
2. Select the Admin tab.
3. Select an account from the dropdown in the ACCOUNT column.
4. Select a property from the dropdown in the PROPERTY column.
5. Select a view from the dropdown in the VIEW column.
6. Click "View Settings"
7. Copy the view ID. You'll need to enter it with ga: as a prefix.

• You can specify your private key through environment variables either as a file path, or the contents of the key (helpful for Heroku and Heroku-like systems).

To specify a file path:

export ANALYTICS_KEY_PATH="/path/to/secret_key.json"

To specify the key directly, paste in the contents of the JSON file's private_key field directly and exactly, in quotes, and rendering actual line breaks (not \n's) (below example has been sanitized):

export ANALYTICS_KEY="-----BEGIN PRIVATE KEY-----
[contents of key]
-----END PRIVATE KEY-----
"

• Make sure your computer or server is syncing its time with the world over NTP. Your computer's time will need to match those on Google's servers for the authentication to work.

• Test your configuration by printing a report to STDOUT:

./bin/analytics --only users

If you see a nicely formatted JSON file, you are all set.

• (Optional) Authorize yourself for S3 publishing.

If you plan to use this project's lightweight S3 publishing system, you'll need to add 6 more environment variables:

export AWS_REGION=us-east-1
export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=[your-key]
export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=[your-secret-key]

export AWS_BUCKET=[your-bucket]
export AWS_BUCKET_PATH=[your-path]
export AWS_CACHE_TIME=0

Other configuration

If you use a single domain for all of your analytics data, then your profile is likely set to return relative paths (e.g. /faq) and not absolute paths when accessing real-time reports.

You can set a default domain, to be returned as data in all real-time data point:

export ANALYTICS_HOSTNAME=https://konklone.com

This will produce points similar to the following:

{
  "page": "/post/why-google-is-hurrying-the-web-to-kill-sha-1",
  "page_title": "Why Google is Hurrying the Web to Kill SHA-1",
  "active_visitors": "1",
  "domain": "https://konklone.com"
}

Use

Reports are created and published using the analytics command.

analytics

This will run every report, in sequence, and print out the resulting JSON to STDOUT. There will be two newlines between each report.

A report might look something like this:

{
  "name": "devices",
  "query": {
    "dimensions": [
      "ga:date",
      "ga:deviceCategory"
    ],
    "metrics": [
      "ga:sessions"
    ],
    "start-date": "90daysAgo",
    "end-date": "yesterday",
    "sort": "ga:date"
  },
  "meta": {
    "name": "Devices",
    "description": "Weekly desktop/mobile/tablet visits by day for all sites."
  },
  "data": [
    {
      "date": "2014-10-14",
      "device": "desktop",
      "visits": "11495462"
    },
    {
      "date": "2014-10-14",
      "device": "mobile",
      "visits": "2499586"
    },
    {
      "date": "2014-10-14",
      "device": "tablet",
      "visits": "976396"
    },
    // ...
  ],
  "totals": {
    "devices": {
      "mobile": 213920363,
      "desktop": 755511646,
      "tablet": 81874189
    },
    "start_date": "2014-10-14",
    "end_date": "2015-01-11"
  }
}

Options

• --output - Output to a directory.

analytics --output /path/to/data

• --publish - Publish to an S3 bucket. Requires AWS environment variables set as described above.

analytics --publish

• --only - only run one or more specific reports. Multiple reports are comma separated.

analytics --only devices
analytics --only devices,today

• --slim -Where supported, use totals only (omit the data array). Only applies to JSON, and reports where "slim": true.

analytics --only devices --slim

• --csv - Gives you CSV instead of JSON.

analytics --csv

• --frequency - Limit to reports with this 'frequency' value.

analytics --frequency=realtime

• --debug - Print debug details on STDOUT.

analytics --publish --debug

Public domain

This project is in the worldwide public domain. As stated in CONTRIBUTING:

This project is in the public domain within the United States, and copyright and related rights in the work worldwide are waived through the CC0 1.0 Universal public domain dedication.

All contributions to this project will be released under the CC0 dedication. By submitting a pull request, you are agreeing to comply with this waiver of copyright interest.