Fun With Server Apps This Week

I’ve been having fun with a few new, and new to me, servers and apps this week. Here’s a quick summary.

Fathom

Brett Terpstra mentioned the release of Fathom web analytics. I’ve been keeping my eye open for a simple replacement to the no-longer-supported Mint and Fathom looked close. It’s a single (Go) binary and was super easy to install. I’m testing it with baty.net and so far so good. It’s a lightweight alternative to Matomo for simple web stats.

I see people claim to have no interest in analytics on their blogs and good for them. While I’m in no way obsessed with analytics or “engagement,” it’s nice to know what and how often people are reading. Feel free to block the tracker.

GoAccess

GoAccess is an open source real-time web log analyzer and interactive viewer that runs in a terminal in *nix systems or through your browser.

When all I need is to quickly get a nice view of web server activity logs, GoAccess is very nice. It’s easy to install and use via either a terminal or web browser.

Gitea

I often wish we all used Mercurial or Fossil for source code management, but we don’t. We use Git. That’s where all the tooling is, and it’s where Magit is, so I’m stuck with Git.

I don’t want to store my private projects in someone else’s app but I want a wiki an issue tracking so I’ve installed Gitea. Gitea is a single-binary app written in Go and runs against an SQLite database. It’s like the opposite of running a self-hosted Gitlab instance. Works great.

Caddy

Caddy is a clever, easy to use web server that automatically handles HTTPS. It’s also my favorite thing, a single binary, so installation was basically just copying a file to the server.

My needs are simple, so Caddy has fit the bill quite nicely. I’m running all of the above apps using Caddy as a proxy and it’s all handled by a 20-line config file. Nice.