v2.5.0

This release requires Go 1.21.

Features:

• Quite a few tables are rewritten to a more efficient format. For small to medium instances this will take a few minutes at the most, but if you have very large instances this may take a few hours. It also requires enough free disk space to rewrite the hits table.

  If you want to run steps manually then you can view the migration with:

  % goatcounter db migrate -show 2023-05-16-1-hits
  

  Or if you use PostgreSQL:

  % goatcounter db migrate -show -db postgresql+dbname=goatcounter 2023-05-16-1-hits
  

• The User-Agent header is no longer stored; only the browser and system parsed out of there. It's pretty reliable, and especially mobile browser User-Agents are ridiculously unique. It was always stored only "in case the detection got it horribly wrong", but this has never been needed.

• Add proxy option in serve -tls flag, to give a hint that a secure connection will be used, so we know what value to use for the cookie secure/samesite flags.

• Add experimental "dark mode"; this needs to be enabled explicitly in the user settings. I need help to make this decent:
  #586 (comment)

• Show difference of pageviews compared to previous period on the dashboard.

• Make setup of a new installation a bit easier: instead of telling people to use the CLI, display a form when the database is 100% empty.

Fixes:

• Collecting stats was broken when "sessions" was disabled in the site settings.

• Use navigator.sendBeacon by default in count.js. This will allow using click events on things like PDF files and external URLs:

  <a href="file.pdf" data-goatcounter-event="file.pdf">
  <a href="http://example.com" data-goatcounter-event="ext-example.com">
  

• Sometimes the order of pages was wrong when using PostgreSQL.

• Few smaller bugfixes.

v2.4.1

• Fix regression that caused the charts for SQLite to be off.

v2.4.0

• Add a more fully-featured API that can also retrieve the dashboard statistics. See https://www.goatcounter.com/help/api for documentation.

  This is still as "v0" because some details may still change.

• Default API ratelimit is now 4 requests/second, rather than 4 requests/10 seconds. You can use the -ratelimit flag to configure this.

• Can now also merge paths instead of just deleting them (the "Settings → Delete pageviews" tab was changed to "Manage pageviews").

• Add goatcounter dashboard, which uses the new API to display the dashboard in the terminal (only a basic non-interactive overview for now).

• Add a "Show fewer numbers" user setting; this is intended to still give a reasonably useful overview of what happens on your site but prevent an “obsession” over the exact number of visitors and stats.

• No longer store or display "pageviews": always store and display "visitors" instead.

  The visitor count is the only thing that's interesting in pretty much all cases; the "raw" pageviews are still stored for some future purposes (such as "time on page"), but are no longer stored in most other contexts.

• Add infrastructure for "dark mode".

  This is not yet enabled by default because all "dark mode" themes look "bad" on my eyes, and I'm not really sure what works well for people who do like it.

  So some help is needed here. See: #586 (comment)

v2.3.0

2022-10-17 v2.3.0

• Expand campaigns: the utm_campaign or campaign parameter now is tracked separately, and add a dashboard panel for campaigns. See: https://www.goatcounter.com/help/campaigns

  Old data isn't backfilled as this information wasn't stored.

• There are now binaries for Windows, macOS, {Free,Open}BSD, and illumos.

• WebSockets are now disabled by default, as it turned out a lot of people had trouble proxying them. You can enable it with goatcounter serve -websocket.

• Add -dbconn flag for serve to allow setting the maximum number of connections. The default is also lowered from 25 to 16 for PostgreSQL.

• Add -store-every flag to control how often to persist pageviews to the database.

• Add "Sites that can embed GoatCounter" setting to allow embedding GoatCounter in a frame.

• Add "Hide UI for public view" setting to allow hiding the UI chrome and display only the charts.

• Quite a few bugfixes and minor additions.

v2.2.3

Fix database migrations for SQLite.

v2.2.0

• The database connection string changed; you now need to use -db engine+connect string rather than engine://connect string:

  -db sqlite+[sqlite connection string]
  -db postgresql+[sqlite connection string]
  

  Various aliases such a sqlite3, postgres also work.

  The previous "url-like" strings conflicted with PostgreSQL's URL connection strings, causing confusion.

  ://-type strings without a + will be rewritten, but will issue a warning.

• GoatCounter can now collect language statistics as well, from the Accept-Language HTTP header. This is disabled by default, but can be enabled in the site settings.

• Charts are now drawn as a line chart by default; you can choose to use bar charts in the widget settings menu by selecting the "chart style" for the "Paths overview" and/or "Total site pageviews"

  Both charts are also completely reïmplemented by drawing on a canvas instead of aligning divs in a flexbox because rendering thousands of divs in a flexbox is actually fairly slow.

• The "View as text table" button in the header moved to the "Chart style" section mentioned above; this checkbox was added before the configurable dashboard feature, and especially now that you can set a chart style it makes more sense to set it there.

• Data is now sent over a WebSocket, rather than rendering everything. The upshot of this is that the perceived performance is better: it only needs to calculate the data that's initially visible, and it's okay to wait a bit for the data that's not. The downside is that you need JavaScript, but that was already the case to render the charts.

• There is a "server management" tab in the settings which allows viewing and editing some server internals. This page is only available to users with the (new) "server management" access.

  All sites with just one user have this user's permissions automatically "upgraded"; sites with more than one user since I don't know which user should have which permissions.

  To prevent updating users, you can use (before running migrations):

  % goatcounter db query "insert into version values ('2021-12-13-2-superuser')"
  

  To update an existing user, you can use:

  % goatcounter db update users -access superuser [email protected]
  

• Add -ratelimit flag to configure the built-in ratelimits (the default values are unchanged). See goatcounter help serve for details.

• New translations: Italian, Spanish (Chilean), Turkish.

v2.1.1

This version contains a minor bugfix which fixes database creation for PostgreSQL users.

v2.1.0

Aside from a number of small fixes and improvements, major changes include:

• Support for translations; see https://www.goatcounter.com/translating for details how to translate GoatCounter.

• The import path is now updated to use "zgo.at/goatcounter/v2" so that e.g. "go install zgo.at/goatcounter/v2" works. This should have been done with the 2.0 release, but I didn't realize how this all worked.

• The visitor counter now supports the start and end parameters and the JSON endpoint returns count as well, to get the total pageview count.

• You can now make the dashboard viewable to anyone who has a secret token (e.g. https://mystats.example.com?access-token=5g4..)

This release requires Go 1.17 to build.

v2.0.4

• Deal with duplicate entries in the user_agents table in the migration instead of erroring out; mostly fixes a situation that could happen if you ran the broken migrations in 2.0.0 or 2.0.1.

Be sure to read the release notes for 2.0.0 as there are some incompatibilities and manual actions!

v2.0.3

• Fix if you had already run the broken migrations in 2.0.0 or 2.0.1.

• Handle failures in goatcounter import a bit more gracefully.

Be sure to read the release notes for 2.0.0 as there are some incompatibilities and manual actions!