Installing Piwik on CentOS 7

Piwik is a free and open-source web analytics application that provides detailed reports on your website's visitors, including their demographics, behavior, and usage patterns. It can be installed on your own server, giving you full control over your data and ensuring privacy compliance.

To install Piwik on CentOS 7, you can follow these steps:

1. Connect to your CentOS 7 server via SSH.
2. Update the package list and upgrade the system by running the following commands:

   sudo yum update -y sudo yum upgrade -y

3. Install Apache web server by running the following command:

   sudo yum install httpd -y

4. Start and enable Apache to automatically start on boot:

   sudo systemctl start httpd sudo systemctl enable httpd

5. Install PHP and necessary extensions by running the following command:

   sudo yum install php php-cli php-mysql php-gd php-mbstring -y

6. Start and enable PHP-FPM service:

   sudo systemctl start php-fpm sudo systemctl enable php-fpm

7. Install MariaDB server by running the following command:

   sudo yum install mariadb-server -y

8. Start and enable MariaDB service:

   sudo systemctl start mariadb sudo systemctl enable mariadb

9. Secure your MariaDB installation:

   sudo mysql_secure_installation

10. Create a new database and user for Piwik:

    sudo mysql -u root -p CREATE DATABASE piwikdb; CREATE USER 'piwikuser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'your_password'; GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON piwikdb.* TO 'piwikuser'@'localhost'; FLUSH PRIVILEGES; EXIT;

11. Download the latest version of Piwik from the official website:

    wget https://builds.piwik.org/piwik.zip

12. Unzip the downloaded file:

    unzip piwik.zip

13. Move the extracted files to the document root of your web server:

    sudo mv piwik /var/www/html/

14. Set the correct permissions on the Piwik directory:

    sudo chown -R apache:apache /var/www/html/piwik

15. Access Piwik through your web browser and follow the installation wizard:

    http://your_server_ip/piwik

16. During the installation, provide the database details you created earlier.
17. Once the installation is complete, create a cron job to regularly run the Piwik archiving process:

    sudo crontab -u apache -e

    Add the following line to the file (replace "your_server_ip" with your server's IP address):

    * * * * * php /var/www/html/piwik/console core:archive --url=http://your_server_ip/piwik/ &> /dev/null

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Piwik on CentOS 7. You can now access Piwik's web interface to configure and analyze your website's data.