Kaunta

Self-hosted web analytics. The browser tracker sets no cookies, respects Do Not Track by default, and reports only to the instance you run. One binary serves the collector, the dashboard, and an MCP endpoint, so there is nothing else to deploy and nothing leaves your server.

What it does

• Collects pageviews including SPA navigation, outbound clicks, file downloads, custom events, scroll depth, engagement time, and UTM attribution. A 1×1 GIF pixel covers clients without JavaScript, and an API-key ingestion endpoint covers servers and background jobs.
• Reports visitors, pageviews, bounce rate, a pageview series, and breakdowns by page, entry and exit page, source, acquisition channel, referrer, country, city, region, browser, OS, device, custom event, and every UTM field. Click any row to filter the whole dashboard. Campaigns, goals, a world map, a live feed, and CSV export are built in.
• Answers agents over MCP: 30 tools on the same port, plus four interactive panels that an MCP Apps host renders inline rather than printing JSON.

Install

You need PostgreSQL 18 or newer and an empty database. The released gem carries a prebuilt binary, so there is nothing to compile:

gem install kaunta
export DATABASE_URL='postgresql://kaunta:kaunta@localhost:5432/kaunta?sslmode=disable'
kaunta serve

Open http://localhost:3000/setup. With no users configured Kaunta serves a setup wizard that checks the database, applies its migrations, creates the administrator, writes kaunta.toml with mode 0600, and continues into the main server in the same process.

Add the tracker

Create a website in the dashboard, then put its ID in the snippet:

<script async src="https://analytics.example.com/k.js"
  data-website-id="YOUR-WEBSITE-ID"></script>

Every option is in the tracker reference. To keep your own visits out of the data, open any tracked page with ?kaunta_ignore=true.

Ask an agent

Set mcp = true and point an MCP client at /mcp with an API key, and it can read the same analytics the dashboard shows, manage websites and goals, and take backups. Writes require human confirmation through MCP elicitation, so an agent cannot delete a website on its own. Hosts that implement MCP Apps render the overview, live, map, and goal panels as interactive views. See MCP integration.

Configuration

Later sources win: built-in defaults, then ./kaunta.toml (or $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/kaunta/kaunta.toml), then environment variables, then the --database-url, --port, and --data-dir flags.

database_url = "postgresql://kaunta:kaunta@localhost:5432/kaunta?sslmode=disable"
port = "3000"
data_dir = "./data"
secure_cookies = true
trusted_origins = ["localhost"]
# Keep proxy_mode above any TOML table header.
proxy_mode = "none"        # none, xforwarded, cloudflare
excluded_ips = []          # addresses or CIDR blocks that are never recorded
mcp = false                # serve the MCP endpoint at /mcp
event_retention_days = 0   # 0 keeps events indefinitely

proxy_mode has to sit above a [trusted_origins] table: in TOML, a key written after a table header belongs to that table, and the top-level setting is then silently absent. trusted_origins takes an array or a comma-separated string.

The environment equivalents are DATABASE_URL, PORT, DATA_DIR, SECURE_COOKIES, TRUSTED_ORIGINS, PROXY_MODE, EXCLUDED_IPS, MCP_ENABLED, and EVENT_RETENTION_DAYS; an empty value counts as unset, and an invalid proxy mode or retention value stops startup. Logging reads KAUNTA_LOG_LEVEL, KAUNTA_LOG_FORMAT (json for JSON lines), and KAUNTA_LOG_SOURCE.

CLI

kaunta serve
kaunta migrate up                    # also runs at startup
kaunta migration-status
kaunta healthcheck
kaunta user create admin --name "Administrator"
kaunta website create example.com --name "Example"
kaunta website tracking-code example.com
kaunta apikey create example.com --name collector --scope ingest
kaunta backup create --days 7 --output ./backups
kaunta backup restore ./backups/kaunta-full-...dump

Global flags work before or after a subcommand, and kaunta <command> --help prints the full syntax. Migrations only roll forward: there are no down migrations, and partial steps are unsupported.

Docker

docker compose up --build

The stack runs PostgreSQL 18 and publishes Kaunta on http://localhost:3010, with named volumes for database and application data. The runtime image runs as an unprivileged user and ships a health check. Self-hosting covers reverse proxies, systemd, backups, upgrades, retention, and partition compaction.

Development

Kaunta is written in Rust and builds with the toolchain pinned in rust-toolchain.toml:

cargo run -p kaunta -- serve                 # run it
cargo test --workspace                       # unit and integration tests
cargo test -p kaunta-e2e -- --ignored        # browser and API scenarios

The e2e scenarios are opt-in because they drive a real Chrome against a real database. crates/kaunta-e2e/README.md explains the harness, including the screenshot tour used for design review.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.