3 posts
I wanted first-party analytics on my blog without handing traffic data to a SaaS vendor. Umami checked every box: open source, self-hostable, and friendly to privacy. I already keep a small VPS online 24/7, so dedicating a slice of that machine to Umami felt like a perfect fit.
Analytics turned into a blind spot once I shut off the usual trackers. I needed something:
Recently, a few hours after setting up Umami with Docker and Nginx on my VPS, I stumbled into a misconfiguration that left the admin dashboard exposed to the public web. Thankfully, there was no immediate danger. Since right after creating Umami's docker instance, I have updated the admin username and password immediately, and locked it down before anything bad could happen. Still, it was a stressful reminder that small mistakes in deployment can have big consequences.
Here’s the story of what happened and what I learned along the way.
Like a lot of developers coming from Linux or a server environment, I hit some confusion when setting up Docker on my Mac. On Linux, you just install Docker and it works natively. On macOS, it’s a bit different — there’s no native Docker Engine because we don’t have a Linux kernel. That’s where tools like Docker Desktop and Colima come in.
Let me walk through what I’ve learned.