visits-tracker

A very simple visits tracker

Overview

Visits Tracker tracks visits to a particular page or group of pages (e.g. a user's profile page, all pages by a particular user, all pages).

You can group related pages together by giving them a namespace, and visits to any of those pages will be considered as the same.

Usage

Add the package to your application.

meteor add brewhk:visits-tracker

Client

Visits Tracker provides the VisitsTracker object on the client, which carries three functions - addVisit, getVisitsCount, getVisitsCountBetween.

VisitsTracker.addVisit

Increments the visit count by 1. (see notes on VISIT_TRACKER_SESSION_DURATION below)

VisitsTracker.addVisit('namespace', function (error, result) {
	console.log(error);
	console.log(result); // returns `1` if success, regardless of whether the count was incremented or not
});

VisitsTracker.getVisitsCount

Get the visits count for a particular namespace.

VisitsTracker.getVisitsCount('namespace', function (error, result) {
	console.log(error);
	console.log(result); // returns the total visits count for that namespace
});

VisitsTracker.getVisitsCountBetween

Get the visits count for a particular namespace between two timestamps.

VisitsTracker.getVisitsCountBetween('namespace', 0, 1449478438, function (error, result) {
	console.log(error);
	console.log(result); // returns the total visits count for that namespace between the two timestamps
});

Server

Set the following environment variables on your machine.

• HTTP_FORWARDED_COUNT - This must be set properly for Visits Tracker to obtain the correct IP address. Set to 1 if you are running behind a reverse proxy server, or 0 if the client is connecting directly to Meteor

• VISIT_TRACKER_SESSION_DURATION - The length of time (in seconds) for which a visit/session from the same IP address counts as a single visit/session. The session length extends each time the viewer navigates to the same page, or group of pages. For example, let's say you are tracking a set of pages with the namespace brew, and you set VISIT_TRACKER_SESSION_DURATION to be 900 (15 minutes). The initial visit by a client from IP address 123.345.678.90 was made at 00:00:01, this increases the visit count by 1. If the same client navigates to another tracked page with the namespace brew:

  • on (or before) 00:15:00, then that would still count as 1 visit, and the session expiration will extend by another 900 seconds, in this case, to 00:30:00.
  • after 00:15:00, then it would count as a new visit

  Set to 0 if you want to limit to 1 visit per second, set to -1 if you consider all visits as unique visits.