About Matomo
Matomo is a web analytics product you host. Page views stay in your database. Reports cover visits, campaigns and goals. Extra features, when you enable them, come from plugins you choose.
Why it exists
Teams needed visit reports without sending the raw log to a third-party analytics account.
Who uses it
Site owners, analysts, and privacy or compliance teams.
What it is used for
First-party web analytics. It does not replace a warehouse or a finance BI tool.
Open source behind the product
Matomo Cloud is the company's hosted service. The software is this GPL-3.0 project. PHP and MySQL or MariaDB are the stack. The cloud sells operation and support around that code.
How to run it on a server
- Use the official container or the PHP installer with MariaDB or MySQL.
- Serve it on HTTPS and set the trusted host so tracking URLs stay stable.
- Schedule the archive task the install guide describes, or reports fall behind.
- Back up the database. It grows with traffic.
Follow the project's own guide for the version you install. Commands and file names change between releases.
How to contribute
The Matomo repository welcomes bug reports, docs and plugin fixes. Read the contributing file and keep a change small.
- Read the project's guidelines. Open the repository and look for CONTRIBUTING, the code of conduct and the README.
- Find something to work on. Browse good first issues or all open issues. Documentation and bug reports count.
- Make a small change. Fork the repository, work on a branch, and keep the change focused.
- Open a pull request. Say what changed and why, and link the issue. See open pull requests.
Contributions are accepted under the project's own licence (GPL-3.0). Some projects also ask you to sign a contributor agreement. A doc fix or a reproduced bug is a real contribution.
Licence: GPL-3.0
Copyleft. You can use and modify it, including commercially. If you distribute it or a derived work, you must share the source under the same licence.
This is a plain-English guide, not legal advice. Read the licence in the repository before you ship it or sell a service on top of it.