My Hugo blog is barely a month old, but I already wondered whether anyone besides bots ever stops by. I didn’t want heavyweight or cookie tracking pop ups, so I spun up Ackee —open‑source, cookie‑free, and small enough to ignore until I need the numbers.

What Actually Happened

Ackee went up on the same box that serves the blog—Node, Mongo, nothing exotic.

TLS certs required the classic Certbot–nginx two‑step (stop → certonly ‑‑standalone → start).

Tracker script landed in custom_head.html; Hugo injects it site‑wide.

CORS needed a single env line: ACKEE_ALLOW_ORIGIN=“https://lambwire.net”.

Nginx proxies /tracker.js and /records to Ackee; the dashboard itself is LAN‑only because nobody else needs to see my traffic trickle.

Total time: an evening, most of it spent chasing a stray localhost reference that kept the dashboard empty.

Why Bother?

Now I know how many real humans rotate through (answer: just me!), and I don’t have to route visitor data through a third party. The setup was uneventful, which is exactly how infrastructure should feel.