I have a dynamic IP address, and every time it changes I have to manually go into Matomo, check to see if it logged any of my own visits, delete them in the GDPR tools, and update my IP in the general website settings. It’s moderately annoying to do, and after doing this every once and a while for a year I’d like to find a way to automate this.
I already have a script running on the server I have Matomo on that checks if my IP changes every once and a while, so I’d like to be able to automatically update the “Global list of Excluded IPs” field automatically when this happens. I’ve looked through the PHP config files and the database schema but couldn’t find anything (though I could have missed it).
Does anyone know where this setting is stored so I can update it automatically?
I managed to find a workaround. While I couldn’t find the global excluded IP field in any of the database tables, I was able to find the excluded_ips column in the sites table. Instead of using the global excluded IP field, I decided to make a script that automatically sets the excluded IPs for all of the available sites at once.
Here’s what I did if anyone else encounters the same issue.
I made the following template SQL script, excluded_ips_updater.sql, that excludes all visits from an empty wildcard field, {}. This is where I format in my public IP address later. (In my database, all of the table names are prefixed with matomo_, but this might not be the case for you.)
USE matomo;
UPDATE matomo_site SET excluded_ips="{}";
Then, in order for this to work, I run the following Bash command. What this does is curls the contents of the My IP API to get our public IP address (the -s makes curl silent), replaces the {} in the SQL script with the public IP, and finally pipes into MySQL using my login credentials. Not that there is no space between the -p flag and your password.
sed "s/{}/$(curl -s https://api.my-ip.io/ip)/g" excluded_ips_updater.sql | mysql -u matomo -pmatomoUserPassword
And that’s done! One can get this to run automatically on boot or every X amount of time using a cronjob or similar.
I’d still like to know whether or not there’s a way to do this using the global excluded IPs list as it would be a lot more elegant, but this works for now. I hope this might be useful to anyone who ran into the same problem as I did.