How to track downloads from an Eclipse update site?

Question

I have a plug-in that I am distributing via an Eclipse update site. I want to track how many times it is being downloaded, and preferably by whom.

For regular pages on my site, I can use Google analytics. However, Eclipse doesn't use any HTMLs when going for update sites.

Is there any way to do this when I don't have access to the hosting apache?

Answer 1

When you say update site - do you mean your own URL or an eclipse repository ?

I guess really you need access to the logs of the underlying server. This way you could monitor whatever type of request eclipse initiates (I'd guess its just a standard HTTP request)

Steve

Answer 2

AFAICT, your only option is to work with web server logs. I wrote this article about tracking Update Site downloads using AWStats, but it requires some server side tweaking. This is just one time set up, though. After that, you use AWStats using its' web interface.

Answer 3

A dirty trick you can do is to add a dummy feature in your site.xml which points at a counter page instead of a .jar file. E.g.

<feature url="http://yourcountersite.com/counterpage.php" id="" version=""> 
  <category name="YourCategory"/> 
</feature> 

The update manager will contact the counter page when it tries to install stuff from your update site but will otherwise ignore this feature.