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Cookie-free analytics with GoatCounter on Hugo

hugo analytics goatcounter
The two Hugo template gates that keep dev-server pageviews out of production analytics.

GoatCounter (MIT-licensed, cookie-free, free under 100k pageviews/month on the hosted tier) is one <script> tag on any static site. On a Hugo site, the non-obvious bit is gating that script so dev-server pageviews don’t pollute the production count.

The two gates #

layouts/partials/head.html, just before </head>:

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{{ with site.Params.goatcounter }}
{{ if hugo.IsProduction }}
<script data-goatcounter="https://{{ . }}.goatcounter.com/count"
        async src="//gc.zgo.at/count.js"></script>
{{ end }}
{{ end }}

config.toml:

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[params]
    goatcounter = "bitsby"  # Subdomain at goatcounter.com

The two conditions do different jobs:

  • {{ with site.Params.goatcounter }} is for portability. If the param is missing or empty, nothing is emitted. Commenting out one line in config.toml disables analytics. A fork of the repo doesn’t accidentally ship counts under someone else’s account.
  • {{ if hugo.IsProduction }} is for hygiene. hugo server (the dev server, what task runs in this repo) leaves hugo.IsProduction as false; hugo (the build command, what task build runs) sets it to true. So localhost previews never phone home, and deployed pages do.

Verify each gate #

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# Dev — no tag injected
task && curl -s http://localhost:1313/ | grep -c data-goatcounter
# 0

# Production build — tag present
hugo --gc --minify && grep -c data-goatcounter public/index.html
# 1

See Also

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