piwikproR

library(piwikproR)

piwikproR is a package to access data via the API of PIWIK PRO.

PIWIK PRO is a tool to measure traffic of a website. They offer an API for fetching all metrics and dimensions so you can use them in your own program.

This R-Package uses the API to fetch the data from PIWIK PRO using R-code. You get the data as tibble (or as a data.frame). So it’s easy to analyze the data with the whole power of R.

Installation

Using devtools it’s easy to install piwikproR:

devtools::install_github("dfv-ms/piwikproR")

Usage

Load the library

library(piwikproR)

Credentials for API, token

First you need to setup an access to the API. See here: [https://developers.piwik.pro/en/latest/platform/getting_started.html#create-api-credentials-and-an-access-token]

Let’s say you put them into a list:

piwik_pro_credentials <- list(
  client_id = "my_client_id",
  client_secret = "my_client_secret",
  url = "https://my_site.piwik.pro"
 )

Using these credential you can fetch a token

token <- get_login_token(piwik_pro_credentials)

## Website id Set the website_id and the date range.

website_id <- 'my_website_id'
start.date <- "2021-04-01"
end.date <- "2021-04-30"

Defining the columns to be fetched

Now we define the columns we want to fetch. Here’s an example:

We want to fetch the date, the url (only the path without the hostname) and the page_views:

columns <- tibble::tribble(
  ~column, ~transformation,
  "timestamp", "",
  "event_url", "to_path",
  "page_views", "",
)

## Filters We’re only interested in – let’s say – Desktop requests. So let’s set a filter:

filters <- tibble::tribble(
 ~column, ~operator, ~value,
 "device_type", "eq", 0
)
filters <- build_filter(filters, "and")

## Fetching the data

query <- build_query(lubridate::ymd(start.date), lubridate::ymd(end.date), website_id,
                    filters = filters,
                    columns, max_lines = 0
)
data <- send_query(query, token, caching = TRUE, fetch_by_day = FALSE)

Metrics and Dimensions Documentation

PIWIK PRO offers a great documentation of all metrics and dimensions starting here [https://developers.piwik.pro/en/latest/custom_reports/index.html]

Developing

I’m using unit tests to test my code. But these tests run against a special website_id whose data is not publicly available. So I put all those sensitive data into a private package piwikproRTests. If this package is not available all tests are skipped.

Issues

If you find a bug or if you have a feature request feel free and open an issue

Thanks

dfv media group

Thanks to my employer dfv media group for the permission to publish this package as open source.