Self-Hosted Analytics with Plausible and exe.dev

David Viramontes

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David Viramontes

2026-04-26

I've been wanting to collect basic analytics on this blog and the other small sites I've deployed for personal use. Nothing fancy — just enough to know what people read and where they come from. The two requirements: I don't want to hand my visitors over to an ad network, and I don't want to babysit infrastructure.

This is a good use case for exe.dev — paired with Plausible Community Edition, it took less than an hour to put together.

Why not Google Analytics?

The short answer: when something online is free, you are usually the product. Google Analytics is free because the data it collects is valuable to Google. For a personal blog with a few hundred visitors a month, that trade-off makes no sense. Plausible is open source, GDPR-friendly, doesn't use cookies, and the dashboard tells me exactly what I want to know without a 30-tab configuration UI. If you're curious what that dashboard looks like, Plausible hosts a public one for their own site at plausible.io/plausible.io.

Why exe.dev?

exe.dev gives me a small VM with an HTTPS proxy that handles TLS termination and DNS for me. I don't have to provision a certificate, point a domain, or run Caddy/nginx in front of anything. The proxy hands me an *.exe.xyz hostname and that's the public address of the service. For a side-project analytics box, that's the entire ops story.

The canonical setup docs live in the plausible/community-edition repo — the steps below are the exe.dev-flavored version of those, with the proxy and TLS bits filled in.

Prerequisites

Docker and Docker Compose installed on the VM
SSH key registered with exe.dev (ssh-keygen -t ed25519 + ssh exe.dev to register)

Step 1: Clone the repository

git clone -b v3.2.0 --single-branch https://github.com/plausible/community-edition plausible-ce
cd plausible-ce

Step 2: Create the environment file

touch .env
echo "BASE_URL=https://example.exe.xyz" >> .env
echo "SECRET_KEY_BASE=$(openssl rand -base64 48)" >> .env

A couple of things that are easy to get wrong here:

BASE_URL must match the exe.dev proxy hostname, not localhost. Plausible's origin check will reject requests otherwise.
SECRET_KEY_BASE must be at least 64 bytes — the -base64 48 flag gives you 64.

Step 3: Expose port 8000

Create a compose.override.yml so Docker maps the Plausible HTTP port out to the VM:

services:
  plausible:
    ports:
      - 8000:8000

Plausible listens on 8000 by default, and the exe.dev proxy will forward HTTPS traffic to it.

Step 4: Configure the exe.dev proxy

Point the proxy at port 8000:

ssh exe.dev share port example 8000

By default, the proxy is private — visitors get bounced to an exe.dev login page. That's the right default for most things, but it's wrong here: the tracker script and event endpoint need to be reachable by unauthenticated browsers on the sites I'm tracking. So the proxy has to be public:

ssh exe.dev share set-public example

If you skip this step, requests to /js/script.js and /api/event get redirected to the login page and no analytics data is collected. Plausible has its own dashboard auth, so the data behind the dashboard is still protected even with the proxy public.

Step 5: Start the services

docker compose up -d

This starts three containers:

plausible (ghcr.io/plausible/community-edition:v3.2.0) — the web app and analytics ingestion endpoint.
plausible_db (postgres:16-alpine) — stores users, sites, and settings.
plausible_events_db (clickhouse/clickhouse-server:24.12-alpine) — stores the analytics events themselves.

Migrations run automatically on first start.

Step 6: Create your account

Visit https://example.exe.xyz/register and create the first user. That account becomes the admin.

Adding the tracker to your site

Once Plausible is up, registering a site in the dashboard gives you a snippet. Drop it into the <head> of any page you want to track — a static HTML file, a templated page, or whatever your framework uses to add tags there:

<script defer src="https://example.exe.xyz/js/script.js"></script>
<script>
  ;(window.plausible =
    window.plausible ||
    function () {
      ;(plausible.q = plausible.q || []).push(arguments)
    }),
    (plausible.init =
      plausible.init ||
      function (i) {
        plausible.o = i || {}
      })
  plausible.init()
</script>

That's it. Pageviews start showing up in the dashboard within a few seconds.

If you'd rather pull in a framework-specific wrapper, there are a handful of npm packages for React, Next.js, Vue, Svelte, and friends. They mostly wrap the same snippet above with conveniences like route-change tracking — pick whichever fits your stack.

Useful commands

# Check service status
docker compose ps

# View Plausible logs
docker compose logs plausible --tail 50

# Restart Plausible (e.g. after changing .env)
docker compose up -d --force-recreate plausible

# Stop everything
docker compose down

# Stop and remove all data
docker compose down -v

Notes and gotchas

Email: SMTP isn't configured, so Plausible can't send verification or report emails. The app still works without it — see the configuration wiki if you need it.
TLS: Handled entirely by the exe.dev proxy. No certificate config on the VM.
Data persistence: All data lives in Docker volumes (db-data, event-data, event-logs, plausible-data). Back those up if the data matters to you.
Public proxy means public dashboard login: Anyone on the internet can reach the login page and try to send events. Plausible's own auth is what keeps the data safe. If that's not good enough, put a reverse proxy in front that only allows public access to /js/* and /api/event, and requires auth for everything else.

Wrap-up

This is the kind of project exe.dev makes really easy to deploy. No DNS, no certificates, no nginx config — just a VM, a Docker compose file, and a hostname that works. I get analytics I actually own, and my visitors don't get tracked across the web, respecting their privacy.

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