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Upgrading from Piwik 2.17.1 to Piwik 3.0.0

Piwik have just announced the release of Piwik 3.0 and I was excited to try it out. I've been running Piwik on this site for just over a year. I like Piwik because it allows me to run analytics1 on this site while respecting users privacy, giving users the option to opt-out2 of tracking and it means I don't share their data with a 3rd party like Google.

The upgrade was fairly seamless.

When I logged in there was a notification saying an update was available.

New update avalible

I clicked on the update link to update and selected "Update Automatically"

Update automatically

After about 10 seconds I got a message saying the update was successful

Update successfull

Then I had to upgrade the database, as this is a very low traffic site I decided to upgrade in the browser

Database upgrade

The update finished and I continued on to piwki

Upgrade finished

Only when I reloaded the page I was getting 500 server errors

Piwik 500 Server error

Looking in /var/log/apache2/error.log I saw a number of errors saying:

/var/www/html/piwik/plugins/.htaccess: Options not allowed here

I found that the .htaccess file in the plugins directory had a line at the end

Options -Indexes

That line stops people getting a directory listing of the files in the plugins folder, so it's an important security feature.

I edited my apache2 config and changed my AllowOverride setting from

<Directory /var/www/html/piwik>
        AllowOverride FileInfo Limit AuthConfig
</Directory>

to

<Directory /var/www/html/piwik>
        AllowOverride FileInfo Limit AuthConfig Options=Indexes
</Directory>

After that Piwik loaded up with no erros.

Piwik 3.0 new sign in page

I've had a bit of a play with it and I think the new dashboard looks nice.

Piwik 3.0 new dashboard

One of the features I've been tracking and looking forward it is the change from md5 hashes to bcrypt so it's great to see that's landed in the 3.0 release.


  1. If pushed, I'd have to begrudgingly admit that it's more about self validation than any technical usefulness of the data. 

  2. It would be better if all web analytics were opt-in, but that's not how the world seems to work. 

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