Install Matomo on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Matomo on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Matomo or formerly known as Piwik is an open-source web analytics application. It rivals Google Analytics and includes even more features and allows you to brand your brand and send out custom daily, weekly, and monthly reports to your clients.

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. We will show you through the step by step installation Matomo open source web analytics on an Ubuntu 20.04 Focal Fossa server.

Step 1.

First, make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date by running these following apt commands in the terminal.

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

Step 2. Install LAMP server.

A Ubuntu 20.04 LAMP server is required. If you do not have LAMP installed, you can follow our guide here.

Step 3. Installing Matomo on Ubuntu 20.04.

Run the following command to download the latest version of Matomo on your server:

wget <a href="<a href="https://builds.matomo.org/matomo-latest.zip1wgethttps://builds.matomo.org/matomo-latest.zip">https://builds.matomo.org/matomo-latest.zip1wgethttps://builds.matomo.org/matomo-latest.zip</a>"><a href="https://builds.matomo.org/matomo-latest.zip1wgethttps://builds.matomo.org/matomo-latest.zip">https://builds.matomo.org/matomo-latest.zip1wgethttps://builds.matomo.org/matomo-latest.zip</a></a>

Unzip the Matomo archive to the document root directory on your server:

sudo unzip matomo-latest.zip -d /var/www/

We will need to change some folders permissions:

sudo chown www-data:www-data /var/www/matomo/ -R

Step 4. Configuring MariaDB for Matomo.

By default, MariaDB is not hardened. You can secure MariaDB using the mysql_secure_installation script. you should read and below each step carefully which will set the root password, remove anonymous users, disallow remote root login, and remove the test database and access to secure MariaDB:

- Set root password? [Y/n] y
- Remove anonymous users? [Y/n] y
- Disallow root login remotely? [Y/n] y
- Remove test database and access to it? [Y/n] y
- Reload privilege tables now? [Y/n] y

Next, we will need to log in to the MariaDB console and create a database for the Matomo. Run the following command:

mysql -u root -p

This will prompt you for a password, so enter your MariaDB root password and hit Enter. Once you are logged in to your database server you need to create a database for Matomo installation:

create database matomo; create user matomouser@localhost identified by 'your-strong-password'; grant all privileges on matomo.* to matomouser@localhost; flush privileges; exit;

Step 5. Configure Apache.

Now we create a virtual host configuration file in /etc/apache2/sites-available/ a directory:

sudo nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/matomo.conf

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
    ServerName analytics.idroot.us
    DocumentRoot /var/www/matomo/

    <Directory /var/www/matomo>
       DirectoryIndex index.php
       Options FollowSymLinks
       AllowOverride All
       Require all granted
    </Directory>

    <Files "console">
       Options None
       Require all denied
    </Files>

    <Directory /var/www/matomo/misc/user>
       Options None
       Require all granted
    </Directory>

    <Directory /var/www/matomo/misc>
       Options None
       Require all denied
    </Directory>

    <Directory /var/www/matomo/vendor>
       Options None
       Require all denied
    </Directory>

    ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/matomo_error.log
    CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/matomo_access.log combined

Restart Apache web server for the change to take effect:

sudo a2ensite matomo.conf
sudo systemctl reload apache2

6. Setup Https Apache.

First, install the Certbot Apache plugin:

sudo apt install python3-certbot-apache

Then, run this command to obtain and install a TLS certificate:

sudo certbot --apache --agree-tos --redirect --hsts --staple-ocsp [email protected] -d analytics.idroot.us

7. Accessing Matomo Web Analytics.

Matomo will be available on HTTP port 80 by default. Open your favorite browser and navigate to <a href="<a href="https://analytics.idroot.us">https://analytics.idroot.us</a>"><a href="https://analytics.idroot.us">https://analytics.idroot.us</a></a> and complete the required steps to finish the installation. If you are using a firewall, please open port 80 to enable access to the control panel.

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Matomo. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing Matomo open source web analytics on your Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official Matomo website.