Allow deleting and updating sites and users from the CLI

[anarcat]

since #120, there's now a create command which is great, but there is no remove command that I can find. I created a test site in my instance - how do I delete it? :)

thanks for this great software!

[arp242]

Ehm, there's no way to do that right now 😅

It probably makes the most sense to expose the "delete site" in settings (currently only enabled for goatcounter.com) with some minor changes rather than adding a new CLI subcommand.

[anarcat]

ah, i see the tab, but now i'm a little confused: i thought that, when i created a "site", i created a goatcounter site, not a site being tracked. what happens when i hit that "delete site" tab? It seems to say it deletes the site being tracked but for some reason I was under the impression that goatcounter create -d foo was creating the analytics site. I think that's because of this blurb in the create usage:

  -domain      Domain to host e.g. "stats.example.com". The site will be
               available on this domain only, so "stats.example.com" won't be
               available on "localhost".

... ie. stats.example.com there made me think I was creating stats.example.com which could track example.com, foo.example.com and whateverelse.com, not example.com itself...

In general, I get confused between the Site settings and Domain settings field. I feel the one provided in -domain is the latter, but is it? And why is there a distinction?

Can multiple "sites" be tracked by a single "goatcounter site"?

Maybe that could desserve a new ticket though... :)

[anarcat]

In other words: I have created both analytics.anarc.at and anarc.at here. I have access to the former, which is the live tracker, but I somehow don't remember how I created the former, nor how to delete it. I suspect I would need to create a anarc.at "site" somehow, or access it in a web browser under that name, but I can't quite wrap my head around that right now...

It would be real nice to have "CRUD" (create/read/update/delete) on the sites (especially "list and delete" i guess) on the commandline to find those orphan sites...

Thanks again, in any case!

[arp242]

The -domain you use with goatcounter create is the domain you want to serve GoatCounter on: analytics.anarc.at in your case.

You can send whatever you want from whereever you want; it's all the same to GoatCounter. It doesn't need to know that your site is anarc.at, and you don't need to fill that in anywhere.

You can optionally fill in anarc.at in the top-left domain in the settings ("Your site’s domain"), that's not really used for anything except linking to the paths in the dashboard. Maybe I should rename that to "Your site" because two "Domain"s in the backend is perhaps a bit confusing.

---

As for the CLI, I thought about that, but I don't really want to make the CLI too complex. On the other hand, if you create a site you can't access (which is what you did) or make a typo, then you can never update or delete it without manual DB frobbing 🤔 Need to think a bit on how to best do this, and also thinking about the future when GoatCounter supports multiple users (which also needs some CLI-fu).

The "obvious way" is goatcounter site update [..] and goatcounter user delete [..] etc., but I'm not sure if I like that. Something like this would probably be better:

Management commands:
  select       Select/list table rows.
  insert       Insert a new table row.
  update       Update an existing table row.
  delete       Delete a table row.

goatcounter select -table users
goatcounter select -table sites -where "code like 'foo%'"

goatcounter create -table sites cname=foo.com

goatcounter update -table sites -where id=1 domain=foo

goatcounter delete -table sites -where id=1

And we can keep create as a convenient shortcut.

It's a little bit more work, but would also be a lot more future-proof and flexibe 😅

[arp242]

In the meanwhile, if you want to delete the site you can use:

update sites set state='d', updated_at='2020-01-01 00:00:00' where cname='anarc.at';

In the SQLite or PostgreSQL CLI and it'll be deleted by the cron job (runs every 12 hours and on server startup/shutdown).

[anarcat]

In the meanwhile, if you want to delete the site you can use:

update sites set state='d', updated_at='2020-01-01 00:00:00' where cname='anarc.at';

Hmm... maybe that's good enough and a docs update would suffice. ;) After all, reimplementing SQL on the commandline might not be necessary...

In the SQLite or PostgreSQL CLI and it'll be deleted by the cron job (runs every 12 hours and on server startup/shutdown).

... cron job? I have a cron job?

[arp242]

docs update would suffice.

Yeah, dunno; wouldn't be in favour of telling people to run manual SQL queries; it's hard for non-technical people, and easy to typo and screw things up.

reimplementing SQL on the commandline might not be necessary...

Yeah, a full SQL-interface might be a bit too much, although it wouldn't be hard to do. Was thinking out loud with the previous CLI interface, but I do like the idea of a generic(-y) CRUD interface, rather than a complex CLI with loads of commands and subcommands. Ideally, the goatcounter help overview should fit in a 80x24 terminal window

... cron job? I have a cron job?

It's just a cron package in GoatCounter itself which runs stuff periodically (while(1) { run_stuff && sleep }); not the system cron 😅

[anarcat]

It's just a cron package in GoatCounter itself which runs stuff periodically (while(1) { run_stuff && sleep }); not the system cron sweat_smile

so that runs magically in the background somewhere (as a coroutine?) or do i need to configure something myself?

[arp242]

Nah, it's magic 🧙‍♂️