Hit Counter

Easily count hits on a website by requesting a svg that displays a hit count.

Live demo hosted at: hitcounter.pythonanywhere.com

What is This?

This is a server that allows a client to request for a svg file that displays views for a url. This url can either be passed as a query parameter or the referrer (or referer) value in the header will be used.

These is also a small method to prevent the refresh count increase issue (if you want to call it an issue, I see it as annoying) which uses cookies.

This makes is very easy too keep track of views on static sites like Github Pages. (can also be uses on non-static sites as a general counter)

How Can I Use it?

Getting an SVG

To get an image for the current url (for example is image is being requested by www.example.com), simply get the image as you normally would:

<img src="https://hitcounter.pythonanywhere.com/count/tag.svg" alt="Hits">

In this example a hit would be added to the websites count on the server. To stop this form occurring but still get the svg file, use:

<img src="https://hitcounter.pythonanywhere.com/nocount/tag.svg" alt="Hits">

Getting the Count Raw

If you don't want the SVG file but still want the count to use in something else, you can do a GET request to /count or as before /nocount to not add a count. For Example:

let xmlHttp = new XMLHttpRequest();
xmlHttp.open('GET', 'https://hitcounter.pythonanywhere.com/count', false);
xmlHttp.send(null);
count = xmlHttp.responseText;

Getting a Count For a Site That Isn't Me

There may be circumstances that the referrer may not be sent or you may want to request a SVG or count for another site. To do this, add a query with url as the name and the url you want to get (encoded obviously).

For example, getting an svg:

<img src="https://hitcounter.pythonanywhere.com/nocount/tag.svg?url=www.example.com" alt="Hits">

And if you want to get the count:

let targetUrl = 'www.example.com';
let query = '?url=' + encodeURIComponent(targetUrl);
let xmlHttp = new XMLHttpRequest();
xmlHttp.open('GET', 'https://hitcounter.pythonanywhere.com/nocount' + query, false);
xmlHttp.send(null);
count = xmlHttp.responseText;

There are also some situations where a client will not send the Referer in the header. This is a simple solution to the server not being able to find where the request came from.

Generating Links With A Tool Hosted By The Server

Going to the location / on the server, you will be served with a HTML page that contains a tool to create the image tag or markdown element and search up a websites count.

Hosting Your Own Server

Running this server is very easy, simple clone the repo (or download the files) and run server.py

I host this on pythonaywhere.com; to do this make sure you have cloned the repo into the filesystem and then create a new project. Modify the "WSGI configuration file" under the "Code" header in the "Web" tab. Change line 16 to import your script and restart the application using the green button at the top.

from server import app as application

If you want to enable HTTPS on pythonaywhere, set config.ENABLE_SSL to True.

How it Works

This server has been built with Flask. Calling one of the /count or /nocount methods will interact with the local SQLite3 database (file) and keep track of urls, views and the counts for urls. Data will be returned based off what is in the database at the current time.

Cookies are used to prevent multiple counts for the same client in a specified period of time. These are simply the url as the key and a random string generated server side as the value.

Inspiration

This project was inspired by github.com/dwyl/hits which is a "General purpose hits (page views) counter" which unfortunately will count GitHub repo views. This was my idea to expand on this and add some features with also making it compatible with any site.

Why Does The Anti-Refresh System Not Work?

On sites like github.com, images are cached. Even though I declare no-cache in the header, GitHub will load the image on their side first which will cause an increase in the count no matter what as it isn't passing back the cookie it got previously (and if it did there would be a timeout for everyone).

martin-steinegger/hit-counter