Databuddy

Understand how people use your product: where they come from, what they do, and where they drop off. Use that insight to decide what to build or improve next.

Databuddy is open-source product analytics for startups. One cookieless script tracks visitors, custom events, funnels, and goals, with opt-in error and web vitals tracking. Databunny, the built-in AI analyst, answers questions about your data and shows the query behind each answer. Feature flags, short links, and uptime monitoring run in the same dashboard.

• Building a product? Try hosted Databuddy or follow the tracker setup guide.
• Running your own stack? Read self-hosting below. A packaged release is still pending.
• Want to help build Databuddy? Read the contributor guide. Bug reports and docs fixes count too.

Self-hosting

Run Databuddy on your server with Docker Compose. It sets SELFHOST=true, so events go straight to ClickHouse, while hosted billing and Databuddy's own telemetry are disabled. Email and AI are optional; see optional services.

Start your instance

These steps need a release with the databuddy-init image. None is published yet; check releases before starting. You'll need Git and Docker Compose for this setup.

git clone https://github.com/databuddy-analytics/Databuddy.git
cd Databuddy
git checkout YOUR_RELEASE_TAG
cp selfhost.env.example .env

In .env, set:

• IMAGE_TAG to the release you checked out.
• POSTGRES_PASSWORD, CLICKHOUSE_PASSWORD, and REDIS_PASSWORD to URL-safe passwords.
• BETTER_AUTH_SECRET and DATABUDDY_ENCRYPTION_KEY to separate random secrets.

The template includes local URLs. Compose supplies database connections, SELFHOST, and browser settings; you don't need to repeat them in .env.

Generate each password and secret separately with openssl rand -hex 32. Then start Databuddy:

# Start the databases and create their schemas
docker compose -f docker-compose.selfhost.yml run --rm init

# Build the dashboard for your URLs and start the apps
docker compose -f docker-compose.selfhost.yml up -d --build

Open your dashboard URL, create an account, and add your first website. The stack includes the dashboard, API, Basket event collector, uptime worker, and short-link service (port 2500). Ports are configurable in docker-compose.selfhost.yml.

For a public instance, replace the template's local URLs with your HTTPS URLs. Keep the dashboard and API on the same parent domain. Set BETTER_AUTH_COOKIE_DOMAIN, such as .example.com, to share login across subdomains. Leave it empty for localhost. Rebuild the dashboard after changing public URLs; they're part of its browser bundle.

No shared parent domain, such as a PaaS default domain like *.up.railway.app? Leave BETTER_AUTH_COOKIE_DOMAIN empty and set the dashboard's API_PROXY_URL to the API's internal URL, then rebuild; the dashboard serves the API on its own origin. Set MCP_URL to the dashboard's public URL on both the dashboard and the API, so MCP clients find OAuth sign-in on that same origin. On a PaaS, build the dashboard from source with dashboard.Dockerfile; its URLs are baked in at build time, so there is no prebuilt dashboard image.

Optional services