Open, cookie-free website analytics you host yourself.
Aurora measures your traffic without storing anything on your visitors' devices
— no cookies, no localStorage, no fingerprinting — and keeps every event in a
Postgres database you control. The tracking script is 2.4 KB over the wire.
ePrivacy Art. 5(3) governs "storage of information in terminal equipment" — a
localStorage key counts just as much as a cookie does. Aurora writes to
neither, so there is no consent banner to show for it.
Visitors are identified by a rotating HMAC derived from the IP address, user agent and a server-side salt, never by a stored identifier. The hash input rotates daily, so yesterday's visitor id cannot be linked to today's, and nothing that leaves the browser can be traced back to a person.
docker run -d --name aurora -p 3000:3000 \
-e DATABASE_URL=postgres://user:password@host:5432/aurora \
-e SESSION_SECRET="$(openssl rand -base64 32)" \
-e AURORA_SALT="$(openssl rand -base64 32)" \
ghcr.io/askides/aurora:latestImages are published for linux/amd64 and linux/arm64. Use :latest or pin a
version (:4, :4.0, :4.0.0); :edge tracks main and is not stable.
Then open http://localhost:3000/signup, create an account, and add a site.
| Variable | Required | Description |
|---|---|---|
DATABASE_URL |
yes | Postgres connection string, used at runtime and for migrations. |
SESSION_SECRET |
yes | Signs the session cookie. openssl rand -base64 32. |
AURORA_SALT |
yes in production | HMAC salt for visitor ids. Without it they would be derivable by anyone, so boot fails. |
AURORA_IP_HEADER |
strongly recommended | The forwarding header your proxy overwrites, e.g. cf-connecting-ip. |
AURORA_COUNTRY_HEADER |
no | The header your edge writes the country code into, when it isn't one of the three known ones. |
AURORA_IP_HEADER deserves a word. Every forwarding header is client-supplied
until some hop overwrites it, and which hop that is depends on your topology
rather than on anything the request can prove. Left unset in production, Aurora
warns at boot and falls back to guessing among cf-connecting-ip, x-real-ip
and x-forwarded-for — all of which a client can set, which makes visitor,
session and bounce figures forgeable. Name your trusted hop and nothing else is
consulted.
Paste the snippet the dashboard gives you into your page's <head>:
<script async defer src="https://your-instance/tracker.js" aurora-id="YOUR_SITE_ID"></script>
Pageviews, including client-side route changes, are tracked automatically.
For custom events, call the global — it queues calls made before the script has loaded, so it is safe to use immediately:
aurora("signup");
aurora("purchase", {
props: { plan: "pro" },
revenue: { amount: 49.0, currency: "EUR" },
});Props take scalars only, up to 24 keys. Revenue currencies are ISO-4217.
Visits, unique visitors, sessions, bounce rate and average session duration over a range you pick, in a timezone you pick, on a Recharts timeseries. Breakdowns cover pages, referrers, acquisition channels, countries, browsers, operating systems, devices, languages and the full set of UTM parameters, plus custom events with their props and revenue.
Any site can be flagged public, which exposes its dashboard read-only at
/websites/:id/s/analytics without a login.
Requires Node 20+ and pnpm 10.
git clone https://github.com/askides/aurora
cd aurora
pnpm install
docker compose up -d --wait postgres # dev Postgres on host port 5434
cp apps/web/.env.example apps/web/.env
pnpm db:migrate
pnpm devThe compose Postgres is pinned to a patch release on purpose. Aurora resolves a
window's boundaries in JS and groups the buckets inside it in SQL, so Node's
tzdata and Postgres's have to agree about a zone or the two halves of a chart
disagree by that zone's offset, silently. Both sides assert their own copy
against AURORA_TZDATA; move them together or neither.
| Command | Description |
|---|---|
pnpm dev |
Run the dashboard in development |
pnpm build |
Build every workspace package |
pnpm test |
Run the test suites |
pnpm typecheck |
Typecheck every workspace package |
pnpm lint |
oxlint |
pnpm format |
oxfmt |
pnpm db:migrate |
Apply migrations |
pnpm db:seed |
Seed sample data |
pnpm db:studio |
Open Drizzle Studio |
pnpm workspace, one deployable app plus the script it serves:
apps/
web React Router app — dashboard, /collect endpoints, tracker host
packages/
tracker Browser tracking script, bundled to apps/web/public/tracker.js
apps/web/app is organised as feature modules (analytics, auth, ingest,
websites) over a shared layer. The dependency direction is one-way and
enforced by oxlint: shared may not import from modules or shell.
React Router in framework mode, Drizzle on PostgreSQL, Tailwind CSS with shadcn/ui, Recharts, Vitest, and oxlint/oxfmt.
Commits follow Conventional Commits with all-lowercase subjects, enforced by a commit-msg hook and again in CI:
feat(analytics): add the campaign breakdown panel
fix: reject null props on the collect route
Releases are automated.
release-please reads those
commits, opens a release pull request, and merging it bumps the version, writes
CHANGELOG.md, tags, publishes a GitHub release and pushes the image to GHCR.
Don't edit versions or the changelog by hand.
Versioning follows SemVer. Aurora 4 is a ground-up rewrite with no migration path from 1.x or 2.x; see CHANGELOG.md.
MIT.