Ansible Plausible

Setup your own Plausible Analytics instance in a few minutes.

Buying a subscription is the easiest way to get started with Plausible but this Ansible playbook makes it easier for DIYers to self host an instance.

Requirements

1. A server with Debian 11 installed.
2. A domain name managed at Cloudflare.
3. Your Cloudflare api token.
4. Email address with SMTP access.

Quick start

Setup your ssh connection first. Edit your ~/.ssh/config on your local machine like so:

Host myhostname
    HostName 192.168.1.1
    User root
    IdentitiesOnly yes

HostName will equal to your server's IP address.

Now you can edit inventory.yml to look like this:

all:
  hosts: myserver
  vars:
    admin_username: "myusername"
    plausible_port: "10000"

Make sure to copy your SSH public key to your server and enable passwordless login.

Now, edit the file at common/vars/main.yml. Change the values are you see fit.

Rename the file at common/templates/example.com.conf and set it to yourdomain.com.conf. Or keep the example template and make a copy of it instead.

Now edit the file at plausible/vars/main.yml and set the values as you like.

After having setup all the variables, you can encrypt your variables files like so:

ansible-vault encrypt common/vars/main.yml
ansible-vault encrypt plausible/vars/main.yml

If you encrypt your variables, edit Makefile and set ANSIBLE_ASK_VAULT_PASS and PLAUSIBLE_ASK_VAULT_PASS to True.

Run make and the play should start.

Once the play is complete, your plausible instance should be accessible at yourdomain.com.

Things to note

• Passwords for Linux users must be hashed using mkpasswd -m sha-512

Installing on an existing server

If you already have a server that you use to host other stuff, you should avoid running the common role because it will destroy your Nginx configs and possibly lock you out from SSH.

Instead, run make plausible to only install Plausible. You will need to have docker and docker-compose installed.

Support and feature requests

Feel free to request support and features on the Github issue tracker.

License and Copyright

License is MIT.

Copyright 2022 Josh Michael karamuth michael@confuzeus.com