Important
yawa is in early development. APIs, configuration, and data formats may change without notice. Use in production at your own risk.
yawa is a self-hosted web analytics platform with no UI. Instead of dashboards, you query your data through the Model Context Protocol (MCP), asking Claude or any compatible AI client questions about your traffic in plain language.
It requires no cookie banners or GDPR consent. Its tracking script is also super tiny.
❯ list my analytics sites
You have one registered site:
┌──────────────────────────────────────┬────────────────┬────────┐
│ ID │ Hostname │ Status │
├──────────────────────────────────────┼────────────────┼────────┤
│ 019ed922-33e5-7b9e-a072-963680861c6f │ yourdomain.com │ active │
└──────────────────────────────────────┴────────────────┴────────┘
❯ what are my top pages this week?
Top pages this week (Jun 15–18):
┌───────────────────┬──────────┬───────────┐
│ Page │ Visitors │ Pageviews │
├───────────────────┼──────────┼───────────┤
│ / (homepage) │ 312 │ 489 │
│ /blog │ 201 │ 334 │
│ /about │ 98 │ 121 │
│ /blog/hello-world │ 87 │ 103 │
└───────────────────┴──────────┴───────────┘
Your homepage leads, with the blog close behind.
yawa grew out of my experience building Juno, for which I had already implemented a custom privacy-friendly analytics solution. When it was deprecated, I needed to move my projects. Since I already had the logic and some reusable code, I thought: why not build yet another web analytics, again 😅.
I also find it interesting to skip the dashboard entirely and rely solely on an MCP server for querying data.
Note
I do not plan to implement features such as user journeys or funnels as I do not have those requirements myself. Other solutions handle that well. Feel free to contribute or hire me if needed.
Yet another web analytics has three moving parts.
Your app or website sends analytics with a lightweight JavaScript library (yawa-tracker) that collects page views, custom events and Web Vitals.
On your self-hosted server, you deploy a Docker container that exposes an API and MCP server. It receives the events and stores them in an embedded DuckDB database, and provides 26+ analytics tools over the Model Context Protocol.
Lastly, connect your MCP client (Claude Code/Desktop, Codex, or any MCP-compatible client) to your endpoint and query your data in natural language.
Run the server on any VPS or locally if you just want to give it a spin.
- Create a
docker-compose.yml
services:
app:
image: peterpeterparker/yawa:latest
ports:
- "3000:3000"
volumes:
- yawa-data:/data
environment:
- YAWA_SESSION_SECRET=${YAWA_SESSION_SECRET}
restart: unless-stopped
volumes:
yawa-data:- Generate a secret
Optional, but improves visitor counting accuracy when generating the session IDs.
echo "YAWA_SESSION_SECRET=$(openssl rand -base64 32)" > .env- Start the server
docker compose up -dNote
Tokens are used to authenticate the MCP client.
docker exec -it <container-name> ./cli token create --name mytokenCopy the token - it will only be shown once.
Note
yawa supports multiple sites.
docker exec -it <container-name> ./cli site create --hostname yourdomain.comOnce your server is running, connect any MCP-compatible client using the token created above.
claude mcp add yawa https://your-server.com/mcp --transport http \
--header "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_TOKEN"Tip
Add --scope user to make it available across all your projects.
Claude web currently requires OAuth for MCP connections. Bearer token support is not yet available. Follow this issue, which aims to add support for custom HTTP headers, for updates.
Once connected, start by listing your sites:
List my analytics sites
What are my top pages this week?
Show me web vitals for my homepage.
Which UTM campaigns are driving the most visitors?
etc.
export YAWA_TOKEN="YOUR_TOKEN"
codex mcp add yawa \
--url https://your-server.com/mcp \
--bearer-token-env-var YAWA_TOKENGo to Context -> Connectors -> Add a Custom MCP Connector. Enter your server URL, wait for detection, then enter your Bearer token.
Add to your mcp.json:
{
"mcpServers": {
"yawa": {
"url": "https://your-server.com/mcp",
"headers": {
"Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_TOKEN"
}
}
}
}There are two ways to add the tracker to your site.
Add this to your site's <head>:
<script type="module" src="https://your-yawa-server.com/static/yawa.js"></script>The script derives the server URL from where it was loaded, so no further configuration is needed. It automatically tracks page views on load and navigation. Web Vitals collection is not available with this method; use the npm package below if you need that.
npm install yawa-trackerimport { init } from "yawa-tracker";
const cleanup = init({
serverUrl: "https://your-yawa-server.com",
});This automatically tracks page views on load and navigation (SPA-friendly via history.pushState and popstate).
To track a custom event, call track with a name and optional metadata:
import { track } from "yawa-tracker";
track({ name: "signup", metadata: { plan: "pro" } });Keys and values must be strings, with a maximum of 10 keys and 200 characters per key/value.
Note
Available with the npm package only.
Core Web Vitals (CLS, FCP, INP, LCP, TTFB) can also be collected by enabling the option when initializing the tracker:
import { init } from "yawa-tracker";
const cleanup = init({
serverUrl: "https://your-yawa-server.com",
webVitals: true,
});| Function | Description |
|---|---|
init(options) |
Initialize the tracker. Returns a cleanup function. |
track(data) |
Fire-and-forget custom event. |
trackAsync(data) |
Async custom event. |
visit() |
Fire-and-forget page view tracking. |
visitAsync() |
Async page view tracking. |
| Option | Required | Description |
|---|---|---|
serverUrl |
Yes | URL of your yawa server. |
webVitals |
No | Enable Web Vitals tracking. Defaults to false. |
Once connected, the following tools are available:
| Tool | Description |
|---|---|
list_sites |
List all registered sites with their IDs |
| Tool | Description |
|---|---|
get_stats |
Total pageviews, visitors, visits and bounces |
get_pageviews_series |
Daily pageviews and visitors over a date range |
get_pageviews_by_hour |
Pageviews by hour of day (0-23) |
get_top_pages |
Most visited URLs |
get_top_pages_expanded |
Top pages with engagement metrics |
get_top_titles |
Top page titles |
get_entry_pages |
Most common landing pages |
get_exit_pages |
Most common exit pages |
get_top_referrers |
Top referrers |
get_top_referrers_expanded |
Top referrers with engagement metrics |
get_browsers |
Browser breakdown |
get_operating_systems |
OS breakdown |
get_devices |
Device type breakdown |
get_languages |
Language breakdown |
get_time_zones |
Time zone breakdown |
get_utm_sources |
UTM source breakdown |
get_utm_mediums |
UTM medium breakdown |
get_utm_campaigns |
UTM campaign breakdown |
get_utm_contents |
UTM content breakdown |
get_utm_terms |
UTM term breakdown |
| Tool | Description |
|---|---|
get_top_events |
Custom event names ranked by count |
get_event_series |
Daily event counts over a date range |
| Tool | Description |
|---|---|
get_web_vitals_summary |
Average, p75 and p90 per metric (CLS, FCP, INP, LCP, TTFB) |
get_web_vitals_by_page |
Per-page breakdown for a specific metric |
get_web_vitals_distribution |
Good/needs improvement/poor counts per metric |
| Variable | Required | Description |
|---|---|---|
YAWA_SESSION_SECRET |
Recommended | Secret used to hash session IDs. If not set, random UUIDs are used instead (less accurate visitor counting). |
YAWA_DATA_DIR |
No | Path where the DuckDB database file is stored. Defaults to /data. If modified, update the volume mount in your docker-compose.yml accordingly. |
Clone the repo and run the app locally.
git clone https://github.com/peterpeterparker/yawa.git
cd yawa
bun install --frozen-lockfilebun run --filter yawa-app devThe app server starts on http://localhost:3000 (events and MCP) and http://localhost:9999 (CLI only).
bun run --filter yawa-cli dev token create --name test
bun run --filter yawa-cli dev site create --hostname localhostbun testbun run --filter yawa-app buildMIT