In Part 1 we talked about why we switched from Google Analytics to Matomo. In Part 2, we discussed how we designed the architecture. Finally, here in Part 3 we will look at the Matomo specific changes necessary to support our architecture.
First, we modified the Dockerfile so that we could run commands as part of the container startup. This allows classdojo_entrypoint.sh to run, but the process that the container ultimately creates is the long running apache2-foreground:
1# The matomo version here must exactly match the version in the matomo_plugin_download.sh script2FROM matomo:4.2.13ADD classdojo_entrypoint.sh /classdojo_entrypoint.sh4ADD ./tmp/SecurityInfo /var/www/html/plugins/SecurityInfo5ADD ./tmp/QueuedTracking /var/www/html/plugins/QueuedTracking6ADD ./tmp/dbip-city-lite-2021-03.mmdb /var/www/html/misc/DBIP-City.mmdb7RUN chmod +x /classdojo_entrypoint.sh8ENTRYPOINT ["/classdojo_entrypoint.sh"]9CMD ["apache2-foreground"]
Next, we wrote a script to download plugins and geolocation data, to bake into the Docker image:
1#!/bin/sh2set -e34MATOMO_VERSION="4.0.2"56rm -rf ./tmp7mkdir ./tmp/8cd ./tmp/910# This script downloads and unarchives plugins. These plugins must be activated in the running docker container11# to function, which happens in matomo_plugin_activate.sh12curl -f https://plugins.matomo.org/api/2.0/plugins/QueuedTracking/download/${MATOMO_VERSION} --output QueuedTracking.zip13unzip QueuedTracking.zip -d .14rm QueuedTracking.zip15curl -f https://plugins.matomo.org/api/2.0/plugins/SecurityInfo/download/${MATOMO_VERSION} --output SecurityInfo.zip16unzip SecurityInfo.zip -d .17rm SecurityInfo.zip1819curl -f https://download.db-ip.com/free/dbip-city-lite-2021-03.mmdb.gz --output dbip-city-lite-2021-03.mmdb.gz20gunzip dbip-city-lite-2021-03.mmdb.gz2122cd ..
Then we write the entrypoint file itself. Since we overwrote the original entrypoint, our entrypoint needs to unpack the Matomo image and fix some permissions first, but then we activate plugins that we want to include:
1#!/bin/sh2set -e34if [ ! -e matomo.php ]; then5 tar cf - --one-file-system -C /usr/src/matomo . | tar xf -6 chown -R www-data:www-data .7fi89mkdir -p /var/www/html/tmp/cache/tracker/10mkdir -p /var/www/html/tmp/assets11mkdir -p /var/www/html/tmp/templates_c12chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html13find /var/www/html/tmp/assets -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;14find /var/www/html/tmp/assets -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;15find /var/www/html/tmp/cache -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;16find /var/www/html/tmp/cache -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;17find /var/www/html/tmp/templates_c -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;18find /var/www/html/tmp/templates_c -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;1920# activate matomo plugins that were downloaded and added to the image21/var/www/html/console plugin:activate SecurityInfo22/var/www/html/console plugin:activate QueuedTracking2324exec "$@"2526We tie it together with a Makefile to build and publish these Docker images:2728build-img:29 sh ./matomo_plugin_download.sh30 docker build . -t classdojo/matomo31 rm -rf ./tmp3233push-img:34 docker tag classdojo/matomo:latest xxx.dkr.ecr.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/classdojo/matomo:latest35 docker tag classdojo/matomo:latest xxx.dkr.ecr.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/classdojo/matomo:${BUILD_STRING}36 aws ecr get-login-password --region us-east-1 | docker login --username AWS --password-stdin xxx.dkr.ecr.us-east-1.amazonaws.com37 docker push xxx.dkr.ecr.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/classdojo/matomo:latest38 docker push xxx.dkr.ecr.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/classdojo/matomo:${BUILD_STRING}
Inside our Nomad job specifications, we inject a config.ini.php file. This contains the customized config.ini.php for Matomo. It is a copy of the original Matomo config.ini.php file, but with some important changes:
1[General]2proxy_client_headers[] = "HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR"3force_ssl = 14enable_auto_update = 05multi_server_environment=16browser_archiving_disabled_enforce = 1
Proxy_client_headers and force_ssl are used as part of our SSL setup. Enable_auto_update prevents containers from updating separately, so that we can coordinate updates across all containers. Multi_server_environment prevents plugin installation from the UI and disables UI changes that write to the config.ini.php file. Browser_archiving_disabled_enforce ensures that the archiving job is the only job that can run archiving, and that archiving won’t happen on demand.
For our non-frontend ingestion containers, we also set:
1; Maintenance mode disables the admin interface, but still allows tracking2maintenance_mode = 1
Another major change is that the Docker command for the queue processor is changed to:
1command = "/bin/sh"2 args = ["-c", "while true; do /var/www/html/console queuedtracking:process; done"]
This allows the job to run in a loop, continuously processing the items in the queue.
Similarly, the archive job is changed to:
1command = "/var/www/html/console"2 args = ["core:archive"]
Which runs the archiving job directly. The admin and ingestion containers all use the default docker command and arguments.
That’s the end of our current journey from Google Analytics to Matomo. There’s more work we have to do around production monitoring and making upgrades easier, but we’re very happy with the performance of Matomo at our scale, and its ability to grow with ClassDojo.
ClassDojo's CTO, Dom enjoys refactoring, continuous delivery, and long walks on the beach with potential engineering candidates. He previously co-founded Wikispaces.