| # Matomo DeviceDetectorCache Plugin |
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| [](https://github.com/matomo-org/plugin-DeviceDetectorCache/actions/workflows/matomo-tests.yml) |
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| ## Description |
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| Makes device detection in Matomo faster by having cached entries for many commonly used user agents. |
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| By default, Matomo runs thousands of regular expressions for each tracking request to detect what Browser, Device, Operating system, ... is being used and to detect if a user agent is a bot or not. |
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| This plugin changes this by first looking if a cached result exists for the particular user agent and if so, directly loads the result from the file system. |
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| We recommend this plugin only if you have a very high traffic website (> 200M requests a month). Depending on your server it may save you a few ms per tracking request (say 5ms which may be say 10% of the total tracking request time). |
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| If you have not that much traffic, the overhead might not be worth it. |
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| ### How to set it up |
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| #### Config setup |
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| Configure these values in your `config/config.ini.php` |
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| ``` |
| [DeviceDetectorCache] |
| access_log_path = "/var/log/httpd/access_log" # The path to your access log file. This command needs to have read permission for this file |
| access_log_regex = "/^(\S+) (\S+) (\S+) \[([^:]+):(\d+:\d+:\d+) ([^\]]+)\] \"(\S+) (.*?) (\S+)\" (\S+) (\S+) \"([^\"]*)\" \"([^\"]*)\"$/" # the regex used to extract the user agent |
| regex_match_entry = 14 # defines which subpattern of the abovce regex matches the user agent |
| num_cache_entries = 200000 # how many user agents should be cached. This value basically depends on your memory and disk space. Likely there is no need to change this |
| ``` |
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| #### Testing if it works |
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| Run this command to see if it works: |
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| ``` |
| php /path/to/matomo/console device-detector-cache:warm-cache -vvv |
| ``` |
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| It should show how many user agents were detected and should print the top 10 most commonly found user agents if things are configured correctly. |
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| Cached files will be stored in `/tmp/devicecache/`. Make sure there is write access for this folder. Every time this command runs previously created cache entries will be deleted. |
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| #### Set up a cronjob |
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| If above test goes well you need to set up a cronjob that runs regularly (eg every few hours or days) to update the cached entries based on the access log. |
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| The cronjob needs to look like for example like this: |
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| ``` |
| 0 8 * * * php /path/to/matomo/console device-detector-cache:warm-cache |
| ``` |
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| If you have multiple servers, you need to set up the command on every server that processes tracking requests. |
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| ## Credits |
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| * [PHP Device Detector library](https://github.com/matomo-org/device-detector/) |
| * [Matomo - Open Source Web Analytics](https://matomo.org) |
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