使用Python Bottle框架进行分析

Question

I know how to log IP for each request with bottle :

from bottle import Bottle, request

@app.route('/index')
def index():
    client_ip = request.environ.get('REMOTE_ADDR')

What else is possible, with bottle (no google analytics), to get more details about user visits? (eg user agent, recurrent or new visitor => useful to count the number of unique visitors per month)

Answer 1

What is "knowable" about a web request is precisely what is sent on the request: all the HTTP headers and the request body.

It isn't useful to talk about the body without specifics, so let's turn to the headers. They will generally include the user agent, the referrer, the user's IP address (technically not an HTTP header but you can think of it as one for this purpose).

A good place to start would be to look at the fields available in the Combined Log Format:

http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/tividd/td/ITWSA/ITWSA_info45/en_US/HTML/guide/c-logs.html#combined

host rfc931 username date:time request statuscode bytes referrer user_agent cookie

Note that HTTP headers are in the complete control of your visitors, so treat their values with due suspicion. That said, most users do not manipulate their headers and let the browser send "reasonable" values, so most sites to indeed perform analytics on the header values. But YMMV depending on your particular use.

To estimate how many visitors return to your site, there are several techniques of varying sophistication, but a place to start is to cookie each visitor with a unique ID, then (using using your analytics software) count how many times each unique cookie visited. (Note that this has implications if you have a privacy policy.)

BTW your question isn't specific to Bottle; this is true of any web framework.

Hope this helps!