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Cairn

Privacy-first, self-hosted web analytics for Laravel.

Every visitor adds a stone. Nobody leaves a name.

Cairn is a single Composer package that gives a Laravel application cookieless pageview, session and event tracking plus a built-in dashboard — without sending anything to a third party, and without needing a cookie-consent banner in its default configuration.

Because it runs inside your application rather than in a browser tag, it can report on things an external tool cannot see: route names, Eloquent models, and authenticated users.

That is the whole install. Visit /cairn.

The honest trade-off

Cairn identifies visitors with a salted hash that is regenerated from new random bytes every 24 hours. The old salt is destroyed, so yesterday's hashes cannot be recomputed by anyone — including Cairn.

That single decision is where everything else follows from, in both directions.

If returning-visitor counts are essential to your work, Cairn is the wrong tool and you should use something that sets a cookie and asks for consent. It will do that job better.

What it looks like

The dashboard is server-rendered Blade. It reads entirely without JavaScript — filters are links, the chart is inline SVG computed on the server, and every chart has a table underneath it. Dark mode follows your system.

Eighteen widgets ship by default, and three more — Languages, Screen sizes and Exit pages — are one line of config away. Each one is a class: reorder them, remove them, or add your own by subclassing Widget — or DimensionWidget, for a ranked table of a single dimension.

The whole page, in one image: light · dark.

A ~ on a visitor count is not decoration. It marks a number Cairn knows is an overcount, for the reason in the table above — and the same marking is applied to any figure that has been scaled back up from a sample.

Requirements

• PHP 8.2+
• Laravel 12 or 13
• MySQL 8+, MariaDB 10.6+, or PostgreSQL 13+

Redis is optional and always will be. Every Redis-backed capability has a database-backed driver of equal correctness, tested against the same suite. Cairn runs on shared hosting with MySQL and nothing else.

There is no build step. No npm, no Vite, no Node. The dashboard's CSS is ~8KB, hand-written, and inlined.

Driver matrix

Both drivers are covered by one shared test suite — 44 assertions run identically against each. A behavioural difference between them is a bug.

Recording things yourself

On a model:

Reading the numbers

Every surface — the dashboard, the API, the Pulse cards, CSV export — goes through one query layer, so they cannot disagree.

Derived metrics are recomputed from their stored components at the level they are shown at. A week's bounce rate is that week's bounces over that week's sessions — never the average of seven daily rates, which is a different and wrong number.

Asking for something that was never rolled up throws, naming the combination. Cairn will not silently fall back to scanning raw entries.

Commands

Rollup and prune are scheduled automatically, and skipped if you have already scheduled them yourself. On hosts with no cron at all, a small fraction of requests carry the work instead.

Start with cairn:doctor. It reports what this particular installation stores and exposes — observations, not errors, several of which may be entirely deliberate.

Compared with Matomo and GA4

Honest version: Matomo and GA4 will tell you more about individual people than Cairn can. That is the difference, and it is deliberate.

Cairn is not trying to replace Matomo's feature set. It is trying to answer "which pages matter and where do people come from" without collecting anything it would rather not hold.

What Cairn deliberately does not do

Not "not yet" — these are decisions.

• Follow anyone across days. Not through fingerprint stitching, fallback identifiers, or "probably the same visitor" heuristics.
• Store an IP address, in any table, log, cache entry, exception message or queue payload.
• Funnels, cohort analysis, heatmaps, session replay, A/B testing, attribution beyond last click. Most of these need cross-day identity, which does not exist here.
• Behavioural bot detection. That means profiling visitors.
• Request high-entropy client hints. Cairn reads the low-entropy ones the browser volunteers and asks for nothing more.
• Scan raw entries from the dashboard. Ever.
• Tell you whether you are compliant with anything. See below.

On compliance

Cairn is privacy-first and cookieless by default, and in its default configuration it stores no personal data and needs no consent banner.

It does not and cannot tell you that your deployment complies with GDPR or any other regulation. Compliance is a property of how software is deployed, configured and operated — not of a library. Nothing in this package or its documentation is legal advice.

Two settings change what Cairn stores, and both are off by default with the consequences spelled out in config/cairn.php:

• privacy.track_user_id — attributes entries to the signed-in user, making the data personal data.
• privacy.durable_identity — replaces the rotating hash with a cookie, reversing the central design decision.

cairn:doctor reports on both, along with anything else worth knowing.

Configuration

Every option is commented. The two above carry a longer explanation of what they change.

The optional beacon, which measures time on page, scroll depth, screen size and Core Web Vitals, is placed with the @cairn directive in your layout — see the installation guide.

Publish tags: cairn-config, cairn-migrations, cairn-views, cairn-assets, cairn-privacy, cairn-inertia, cairn-pulse-views.

Country reporting

Off by default. Cairn bundles no geo database and will not call a third-party service per request — that would send a visitor's address off your server on every pageview. Lookups happen against a local file instead:

Then set privacy.geo_resolver to MaxMindGeoResolver::class. Full walkthrough in documentation/geolocation.md.

Dashboard access

Guarded by a viewCairn gate that, exactly like Telescope and Pulse, denies everybody outside the local environment until you define it:

Dashboard drivers

The Blade dashboard is canonical: server-rendered, no build step, and the one every number is checked against. Two wrappers exist if you would rather the dashboard matched the stack you already run.

Cairn requires neither package — both are suggest entries — so naming one that is not installed serves the Blade dashboard rather than failing.

Livewire renders the same partials and asks the same widgets as the Blade dashboard, so the two cannot report different numbers. What it adds is filtering without a page load. Selecting the driver also registers the component as cairn-dashboard, which is what lets you ignore Cairn's own route and put the dashboard inside your application's layout:

No driver polls. Every dashboard is a snapshot, as fresh as the request that drew it and no fresher, and deliberately the same answer under all three — how old a number is should not depend on which wrapper you chose. Live-updating the widgets where staleness actually misleads is planned for a later release.

Inertia renders a Cairn/Dashboard page. Cairn ships the controller, its typed props, and a TypeScript definition of them under --tag=cairn-inertia — not a styled page component, which is yours to write against those types. A dashboard that had to look right inside somebody else's design system is a promise no package can keep. If you want one that works out of the box, use Blade.

Further reading

• Geolocation
• A longer write-up, with the full configuration reference and more screenshots: ifhighlow.com/portfolio/cairn-privacy-first-analytics-for-laravel
• The release announcement: Introducing Cairn

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md. The privacy invariants are not negotiable, and a contribution that weakens one will be declined however well written it is.

Redis is required to run the test suite — not to use Cairn, but because the driver-parity tests exercise both drivers against a real server rather than skipping one.

Status

Stable. Cairn follows semantic versioning from 1.0.0. The Cairn facade, the Divoto\Cairn\Contracts\* interfaces, the published config file, the cairn:* commands and the shape of the reporting payloads will not break within a major version. Divoto\Cairn\Support, the storage schema and the Blade markup are internal and may change in a minor release.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.md.