At the time of writing this book, the latest version of Piwik was 1.8; the following are the requirements for this version. A newer version of Piwik may have more or less the same requirements as those covered below.
Firstly, you need to make sure that your server and/or development environment is set up and ready for the install. Fortunately, the requirements of Piwik are not very hard to meet. Most hosting companies' standard PHP and MySQL packages will meet these requirements.
First, you need a web server. The most common, Apache, is the standard for most Piwik installations. Piwik also runs well on light web servers like Nginx or lighttpd. In fact, for high traffic websites, a light web server is the recommended option. But if you are a beginner with Piwik or Nginx, it is best to stick with Apache.
Piwik requires MySQL version 4.1 or greater to store its analytics data.
Piwik also needs PHP version 5.1.3 or higher installed on your web server; version 5.3 or higher is recommended for less memory usage.
You will also need to have either the
pdo
andpdo_mysql
extension installed, or themysqli
extension installed. These MySQL extensions can use some of the more advanced features of MySQL 4.1 necessary for Piwik to run.You will also need the PHP
GD
extension to create the images for some of the graphs in Piwik.
Chances are that a web hosting company will have the required PHP extensions enabled on your account. They are standard on most modern servers. If they do not have it enabled, you can put in a support ticket to have the above requirements met. Editing the php.ini
file to enable the correct PHP extensions yourself will be covered in the installation process.