I recently went looking for an analytics tool for an app I’m developing. There are plenty of options out there, but most are either too heavyweight or raise privacy concerns. After some research, Aptabase caught my eye — it’s privacy-first, uses no unique user identifiers, fully complies with GDPR/CCPA, comes with a clean and intuitive dashboard, and offers over 10 SDKs covering most major frameworks. Best of all, it supports self-hosting, so your data stays entirely under your control.
The official self-hosting repository makes it look simple — just clone, tweak a few configs, run docker compose up -d, and you’re done. But the actual deployment process had quite a few gotchas, and many others in the Issues have run into similar problems. Here’s what I learned, hoping it saves you some trouble.