flask-track-usage 2.0.0

June 3, 2018 ~ Steve ~ Leave a comment

flask-track-usage 2.0.0 has been released! Thanks to all who helped provide patches and test. Note: 2.0.0 is the recommended upgrade version from 1.1.0. 1.1.1 was released for those who are unable to make the needed changes to move to 2.x. You can check out the latest docs over at readthedocs.

The changes include:

MANIFEST.in: Add alembic to dist
CONTRIBUTORS: Add John Dupuy
py3: Fix import issue with summarization
.travis: Change mysql driver
test: Fix summerize tests for py3
travis: Add 3.6
docs: Quick fixes
README.md: Update docs to rtd
Use parens for multilines
Update versions to 2.0.0
sql: Increase ip_info from 128 to 1024
alembic: Upgrade ip_info from 128 to 1024
alembic: Support for upgrading SQL schema
sql: Create table if it is not present
couchdb: Add track_var and username
redis: Add track_var and username
Adding user_defined variable field to storage
Hooks: add new hooks system
test: Skip mongoengine if connection can not be made
storage: Rename to PrinterWriter
output: Add OutputWriter
storage: Create base class and Writer
requirements: Added six
Copyright now a range
Add CONTRIBUTORS
doc: Add note about py2 and 3
py3: Fix most obvious offenders
Move mongoengine ref in Travis CI config
Update Travis CI config to include mongoengine lib
pep8 fixes
MongoEngineStorage: updated docs; added get_usage
added testing
moved MongoEngineStorage to mongo.py
doc: Minor updates for a future release
Initial support for multiple storage backends
Update versions to denote moving towards 2.0.0
Added MongoEngineStorage code; adding test next.
docs: Update version to 1.1.1
release: v1.1.1
Updates for freegeoip function
test: Update sqlalchemy test for updated flask
test: Update mongo test for updated flask
test: test_data works with current Flask results
travis: Force pymongo version for travis
storage: Minor doc and structure updates for new backends.
Redis support
Added CouchDB integration. (#30)

Introducing Flask-Track-Usage

April 25, 2013 ~ Steve ~ 2 Comments

A little while ago one of the guys on a project I work one was asking about how many people were using the projects public web service. My first thought was to go grepping through logs. After all, the requests are right there and pretty consumable with a bit of Unix command line magic. But after a little discussion it became clear that would get old after a while. What about a week from now? How about a month or year? Few people want to go run commands and then manually correlate them. This lead to us looking around for some common solutions. The most obvious one was Google Analytics. To be honest I don’t much care about those systems. While that one may not (or may be) intrusive on users I just don’t feel all that comfortable forcing people to be subjected to a third party of a third party unless there is no other good choice. Luckily, being that the metrics are service related, the javascript/cookie/pixel based transaction wouldn’t have worked very well anyway.

So it was off to look at what others have made with a heavy eye towards Flask based solutions so it matched the same framework we were already using. Flask-Analytics came up in a search. The simple design was something I liked but the extension was more so aimed at using cookies to track users through an application while we want to track overall usage. I figured it was time to roll something ourselves and provide it back out to the community if they could use it as well.

Here it is in all it’s simplistic glory: Flask-Track-Usage. It doesn’t use cookies nor javascript and can store the results into any system which you provide a callable or Storage object. There is also FreeGeoIP integration for those what want to track where users are coming from. The code comes with a MongoDB Storage object for those who want to store the content back into their MongoDB. Want to know a bit more of the technical details? Check out the README or the project page. Patches welcome!