[Community] Built an alternative dashboard using goatcounter APIs

[abhishekhsingh]

Hi @arp242,

First off — thank you for GoatCounter and for providing a well-documented API. I've been using GoatCounter for my personal site and it's exactly the kind of privacy-respecting analytics I was looking for.

I built an open-source alternative dashboard that connects to any GoatCounter instance via the API:

Live demo: https://abhishekhsingh.github.io/goatcounter-dashboard
Source: https://github.com/abhishekhsingh/goatcounter-dashboard

It's a single HTML file (no server, no build step) with interactive charts, a choropleth world map, dark/light mode, and lazy-loaded sections to stay within the API rate limit.

Not requesting any changes to GoatCounter — just sharing in case it's useful to other users. Happy to close this issue if it's not the right place for it.

Thanks again for the wonderful project!

[arena]

😻 I think this is really nice!

Can it be light background with the goatcounter purple, if so, then why don't you make a PR?

[abhishekhsingh]

Thanks @arena! Glad you like it.

Light theme is already there. There's a toggle in the top-right corner (dark is the default). You can try it out instantly with the demo mode: https://abhishekhsingh.github.io/goatcounter-dashboard (click "Try Demo", no API key needed).

Regarding a PR to GoatCounter itself — Martin has been intentional about keeping the core dashboard simple and lightweight, which is one of the things that makes GoatCounter great. He's provided public APIs specifically so people can build custom visualizations on top. That's the approach I took here, a standalone companion dashboard that anyone can self-host (fork + GitHub Pages, done) or customize however they want, without adding complexity to the core project.

[TigersWay]

Looking nice... in demo mode!

But can't connect, I get Could not reach https://xxxxx.goatcounter.com. Check the URL is correct and the site supports CORS (most GoatCounter instances do).

[abhishekhsingh]

Hi @TigersWay,

Thanks for trying it out!

Could you share a couple of details so I can help debug?

1. Are you using the hosted service (xxxxx.goatcounter.com) or a self-hosted instance?
2. If you open browser DevTools (Network tab) and try connecting, what does the failed request look like? Specifically the OPTIONS preflight request — does it return a status code, and does the response have an Access-Control-Allow-Origin header?

If you're self-hosting behind a reverse proxy (nginx, Caddy, etc.), that's likely the issue — the proxy may need explicit CORS headers for the API endpoints. I can share the nginx config snippet if that's the case.

The hosted *.goatcounter.com service supports CORS out of the box, so if you're on the hosted version it might be a URL format issue — the dashboard expects the full URL like https://yoursite.goatcounter.com (no trailing slash, no /api path).

[TigersWay]

Hi @abhishekhsingh,
Thanks for answering so quickly, and it was worth it 😄 my user is on goatcounter hosted instance, and once I understood:

• the url was to be the simpliest expression of it,
• the "count and read" permission was simply "read" one,
• and of course, I disabled "uBlock Origin" 🥇 .... Sorry!!

It's now working nicely!

[abhishekhsingh]

Glad it's working! @TigersWay
Thanks for reporting back with the details. I'll try to add troubleshooting notes for such cases.
Enjoy your brand new dashboard 😀

[arp242]

Thanks; looks neat.

I should probably work a bit on the styling of GoatCounter; this is already the third such project (that I know of). I should also make a page or readme section for them.

Since we already have "options" for widgets, we and just add the new styles (like circular graphs) without breaking anything for existing users. Just ... need to do the work. It's a bit unfortunate that the frontend is done with Go templates, which work well, but are also a bit tricky to edit if you're not already familiar with it. I've considered rewriting it to something like htmx, but it's a lot of work.

Another thing I need to do is improving the rate-limit: right now it's a simple "max of 4/second", but this should be more like "max of 10/second, and max of 120/minute", or something along those lines. That prevents hammering while still allowing all the requires JSON requests to quickly load in one batch.

Note: entering "stats.arp242.net" resulted in an error; need to use "https://stats.arp242.net".

[gs-sabhishekh]

Thanks @arp242! Really appreciate you trying it out.

Good catch on the URL- entering without https:// should auto-prepend it (the code does handle that), but I'll test again without protocol and mentioned domain specifically and fix whatever edge case is tripping it up.

A community projects section sounds great. If it helps, I can put together a small PR with a "Community" or "Third-party tools" section listing the projects you know of. Happy to do the legwork if you point me to the other two.

The rate limit improvement you mentioned (burst-friendly with a per-minute cap) would be a nice quality of life change for API consumers. The current 4/s also works fine, I just had to build a sequential queue with lazy loading to stay within it on initial page load.

Thanks again for building GoatCounter.