oscarcarlsson/goatcounter-on-fly

Goatcounter on fly.io

This repository contains a template for setting up and running goatcounter on fly.io, including Litestream backing up our SQLite database to a S3 (compatible) bucket. This setup runs great on the fly.io free tier (1 shared CPU, 256 MB of memory, 1 GB of disk), at least for a small website. You can also make use of Backblaze B2's free tier¹ to store your backups.

One important thing to note is that this is a single node setup using local volumes, so in case the host running our container dies we might not be automagically migrated to a new host. However, our data is reasonably safe due to Litestream backups, so we should not lose more than a few minutes of data (at most).

PRs are always welcome!

Prerequisites

• A fly.io account
• An account with a S3 (compatible) storage provider, with a bucket already setup & credentials at hand (see this tutorial for Backblaze specific instructions)
• flyctl CLI installed

Usage

1. Clone or fork this repository.

   git clone https://github.com/oscarcarlsson/goatcounter-on-fly.git && cd goatcounter-on-fly

2. Run the command below and answer the questions - you don't need Redis nor Postgres! This will generate a fly.toml but won't try to launch anything yet. Make sure you change the name for the application as well.

   flyctl launch --no-deploy --memory 256 --name CHANGEME
   

   If you want, you can always specify the region to launch the VM in. You can list all regions by running: flyctl platform regions

3. Create a volume for the database, change to your preferred region:

   flyctl volumes create goatcounter_data --region CHANGEME --size 1

4. Open fly.toml and add the following to the env section:

   [env]
     # Change these!
     GOATCOUNTER_DOMAIN = 'goatcounter.example.com'
     GOATCOUNTER_EMAIL = '[email protected]'
   
     # Change these for your S3 provider!
     LITESTREAM_REPLICA_ENDPOINT = ''
     LITESTREAM_REPLICA_BUCKET = ''
   
     # These can be blank
     GOATCOUNTER_SMTP = ''
     GOATCOUNTER_DEBUG = ''
   
     # Don't change these
     GOATCOUNTER_LISTEN = '0.0.0.0:8080'
     GOATCOUNTER_DB = '/data/goatcounter.sqlite3'
     LITESTREAM_REPLICA_PATH = 'goatcounter_replica.sqlite3'

   Also make sure that the mount section looks something like this:

   [[mounts]]
   source = 'goatcounter_data'
   destination = '/data'
   processes = ['app']

5. Nearly done! Now, create secrets for your secrets:

   flyctl secrets set GOATCOUNTER_PASSWORD="changeme" LITESTREAM_ACCESS_KEY_ID="changeme" LITESTREAM_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY="changeme"

   The secret called GOATCOUNTER_PASSWORD will be the initial password for the admin account.

6. Now, try to deploy the application!

Credits

This is heavily inspired by fspoettel/linkding-on-fly.

Footnotes

1. Their free tier is 10GB free, then $0.005 per GB, which is plenty ↩