---
title: "Deploy Ackee"
description: "Privacy-friendly website analytics that counts views without cookies"
category: "Analytics"
url: https://railway.com/deploy/ackee-analytics
---

# Deploy Ackee

Privacy-friendly website analytics that counts views without cookies

**[Deploy Ackee on Railway](https://railway.com/template/ackee-analytics)**

Machine-readable deploy manifest (JSON, validated by TemplateCI): https://railway.com/deploy/ackee-analytics/manifest.json

- **Creator:** A3A
- **Category:** Analytics
- **Total deploys:** 1

## Template content

### ackee https://s.electerious.com/images/ackee/icon.png

- **Image:** electerious/ackee:latest
- **Health check:** /
- **Public domain:** Yes

### MongoDB https://cdn.simpleicons.org/mongodb/47A248.svg

- **Image:** mongo:8.0
- **Start command:** `docker-entrypoint.sh mongod --ipv6 --bind_ip ::,0.0.0.0 --setParameter diagnosticDataCollectionEnabled=false`

## Documentation

# Deploy and Host Ackee on Railway

Ackee is a self-hosted, privacy-friendly web analytics server built on Node.js and MongoDB. It counts page views, referrers, browsers, devices, screen sizes and languages for the sites you own — without cookies, without fingerprinting and without a visitor identity that survives the day. Bloggers, indie developers, agencies and docs teams reach for it when Google Analytics is more machine than they need and a consent banner is more friction than a traffic chart is worth.

Deploy Ackee on Railway and it arrives wired together: an **ackee** service running the official `electerious/ackee` image behind a public HTTPS domain, and a private **MongoDB** service holding every record on a persistent volume. Browsers reach the ackee service only — the dashboard, the GraphQL API at `/api` and the `tracker.js` snippet share one origin — while the database stays on Railway's private network. Self-host Ackee this way and the only step left is pasting a script tag onto the site you want to measure.

![Diagram of the Ackee and MongoDB services on Railway](https://res.cloudinary.com/rroe4rtk/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1789527051/ackee-architecture.webp)

## Getting Started with Ackee on Railway

Open the generated Railway URL and you land on a sign-in card. There is no registration form and no shipped default password: the account is the `ACKEE_USERNAME` and `ACKEE_PASSWORD` pair on the ackee service, with the username defaulting to `admin` and the password generated at deploy time. Copy it from the service's Variables tab, sign in, and the dashboard opens on an empty Overview.

Your first action is adding a site: **Settings → Domains → New domain**, titled with the site's real hostname — `example.com`, not "My blog" — because the template ships with automatic CORS enabled and Ackee grants browser access to exactly the origins whose domain titles are valid hostnames. Ackee then shows the domain's id and a ready-made snippet for your site's ``:

```

```

Load a page on your site, then refresh the Overview. A view should appear within seconds — that round trip confirms the deployment, the database and the CORS configuration at once. Signing in sets a cookie telling Ackee to ignore your own visits, so test from a private window if the counter stays flat. **Insights** then breaks traffic down by pages, referrers, systems, devices, sizes, languages and durations, and **Settings → Events** defines custom events such as newsletter signups or checkout revenue.

![Ackee overview with live visitor counts and a daily views chart](https://res.cloudinary.com/rroe4rtk/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1789527054/ackee-overview-dashboard.webp)
![Ackee lists of top pages, referrers, operating systems and devices](https://res.cloudinary.com/rroe4rtk/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1789527055/ackee-top-pages-referrers.webp)
![Ackee custom event panels for checkout revenue and newsletter signups](https://res.cloudinary.com/rroe4rtk/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1789527057/ackee-custom-events.webp)

## About Hosting Ackee

Ackee solves a narrow problem well: knowing how many people read what you publish, where they came from and what they used, without collecting anything that identifies them. Each record is stored against a hash of the visitor's IP address, user agent and domain id, salted with a value that regenerates daily. Yesterday's hashes cannot be matched to today's, and older records from a visitor lose their identifier as soon as a newer one arrives, so no browsing history can be reconstructed.

Key features:

- No cookies and no persistent visitor identity, which in most jurisdictions removes the need for a tracking consent banner
- Page views with referrers, sources, durations, operating systems, devices, browsers, screen sizes and languages
- Custom events with total or average aggregation, as charts or ranked lists
- A documented GraphQL API — the dashboard is just one client of it
- Permanent API tokens for status bars, CLI reports and scripts
- A tiny tracking script plus wrappers for React, Vue, Nuxt, Svelte, Gatsby, Angular, Django, WordPress and Flutter

The architecture is deliberately small. The **ackee** service is one Node.js process serving the dashboard, the GraphQL API and the tracker script. The **MongoDB** service stores domains, records, events, actions and login tokens on a Railway volume at `/data/db`, so they survive redeploys. Ackee connects to the database before opening its HTTP listener, so a healthy service also proves the database link.

## Why Deploy Ackee on Railway

Railway removes the administration self-hosted analytics drags in:

- MongoDB is provisioned, networked and given a persistent volume automatically
- HTTPS and a public domain are issued for the dashboard and tracker script
- The database is reachable only over the private network
- Variables, logs and metrics live in one place
- Redeploys pick up upstream releases without touching the data
- Scaling is a slider

## Common Use Cases

- Measuring a personal blog, portfolio or newsletter without a cookie banner
- Giving an agency's clients per-site dashboards on infrastructure the agency controls
- Tracking documentation pages to find which guides readers actually reach
- Recording product events — signups, upgrades, checkout values — through the GraphQL API

## Dependencies for Ackee

- **ackee** — `electerious/ackee:latest`, the official Docker Hub image, running the Node.js server and bundled dashboard on port 3000
- **MongoDB** — `mongo:8.0`, Railway's managed MongoDB, holding all analytics data on a 5 GB volume

Ackee keeps no state on its own filesystem, so it needs no volume. Everything is in MongoDB, which is the service to snapshot before an upgrade.

### Environment Variables Reference

| Variable | Purpose |
|---|---|
| `ACKEE_MONGODB` | MongoDB connection string, including `?authSource=admin` |
| `ACKEE_USERNAME` | Dashboard username, `admin` by default |
| `ACKEE_PASSWORD` | Dashboard password, generated at deploy time |
| `PORT` | Port the server listens on, `3000` |
| `ACKEE_AUTO_ORIGIN` | When `true`, sends CORS headers for every domain whose title is a hostname |
| `ACKEE_ALLOW_ORIGIN` | Explicit comma-separated origin list; only read when `ACKEE_AUTO_ORIGIN` is `false` |

### Deployment Dependencies

- Source repository: https://github.com/electerious/Ackee
- Docker image: https://hub.docker.com/r/electerious/ackee
- Tracking script: https://github.com/electerious/ackee-tracker
- Documentation: https://docs.ackee.electerious.com
- Runtime: Node.js 24 and MongoDB 8

## Hardware Requirements for Self-Hosting Ackee

| Resource | Minimum | Recommended |
|---|---|---|
| CPU | 0.5 vCPU | 1 vCPU |
| RAM | 512 MB total | 1 GB total |
| Storage | 1 GB for MongoDB | 5 GB volume |
| Runtime | Node.js 24, MongoDB 8 | Node.js 24, MongoDB 8 |

Ackee idles well under 150 MB. Storage is what grows: every page view is one small document, so a few thousand views a day uses a fraction of the default volume in a year.

## Self-Hosting Ackee

Outside Railway the quickest path is Docker Compose — a minimal `docker-compose.yml`:

```
services:
  ackee:
    image: electerious/ackee:latest
    ports:
      - '3000:3000'
    environment:
      - ACKEE_MONGODB=mongodb://mongo:27017/ackee
      - ACKEE_USERNAME=admin
      - ACKEE_PASSWORD=change-me
    depends_on:
      - mongo
  mongo:
    image: mongo:8.0
    volumes:
      - ./data:/data/db
```

A single container works too, given a reachable MongoDB:

```
docker run -d -p 3000:3000 \
  -e ACKEE_MONGODB="mongodb://mongo:27017/ackee" \
  -e ACKEE_USERNAME="admin" \
  -e ACKEE_PASSWORD="change-me" \
  electerious/ackee:latest
```

Either way you still terminate TLS, renew certificates and back up MongoDB yourself.

## Is Ackee Free?

Ackee is free and open source under the MIT licence: no paid tier, no seat limits, no hosted plan, and no cap on page views or domains. The only cost on Railway is infrastructure — one small Node.js service, one MongoDB service and its volume, billed by usage. For a personal site or a handful of client sites that lands well under a hosted analytics subscription.

## FAQ

**What is Ackee?**
Ackee is an open-source, self-hosted analytics tool written in Node.js. It records anonymised page views and custom events for sites you own and shows them in a minimal dashboard, with a GraphQL API behind everything.

**What does this Railway template deploy?**
Two services: an ackee service running the official `electerious/ackee` image on a public HTTPS domain, and a private MongoDB service with a persistent volume for the data.

**Why does Ackee need MongoDB?**
MongoDB is Ackee's only datastore. Domains, records, events, actions and login tokens all live there, so the volume on the MongoDB service is what makes your statistics survive a redeploy.

**Does self-hosted Ackee need a cookie consent banner?**
Ackee sets no tracking cookie and builds no persistent visitor id — each record is a daily-rotating salted hash. Most sites therefore need no tracking banner, though the call depends on your jurisdiction and any other scripts you run.

**How do I track custom events in self-hosted Ackee?**
Create an event under Settings → Events, pick total or average aggregation and a chart or list rendering, then send actions to its id from your own code with the GraphQL `createAction` mutation or the ackee-tracker library.

**Can I run more than one replica of Ackee?**
Keep it at one. The daily anonymisation salt lives in the process, so a second replica would hash the same visitor differently and split unique-visitor counts between them.


## Similar templates

- [Typesense vs Meilisearch](https://railway.com/deploy/typesense-vs-meilisearch) — self-hosted Typesense vs Meilisearch
- [Betterlytics](https://railway.com/deploy/betterlytics) — Betterlytics is a cookieless analytics platform GDPR-compliant.
- [Finance Tracker](https://railway.com/deploy/finance-tracker-1) — Private multi-user household finance ledger with budgets and CSV import.

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