Binary Installation

HitKeep compiles to a single statically-linked binary (~80 MB on amd64, slightly smaller on ARM). Download it, run it — that’s the entire deployment.

This makes the binary installation the right choice for:

Bare metal servers and VMs
Air-gapped or restricted-network environments
Raspberry Pi and ARM servers (AWS Graviton, Hetzner CAX)
Organizations that require the smallest possible attack surface

Download

Download the latest release for your architecture from GitHub Releases:

# Linux AMD64 (most common VPS/server)
curl -L https://github.com/pascalebeier/hitkeep/releases/latest/download/hitkeep-linux-amd64 \
  -o hitkeep && chmod +x hitkeep && sudo mv hitkeep /usr/local/bin/hitkeep

# Linux ARM64 (Raspberry Pi, AWS Graviton, Hetzner CAX)
curl -L https://github.com/pascalebeier/hitkeep/releases/latest/download/hitkeep-linux-arm64 \
  -o hitkeep && chmod +x hitkeep && sudo mv hitkeep /usr/local/bin/hitkeep

For air-gapped environments: download the binary on an internet-connected machine, verify the SHA256 checksum from the GitHub release page, then transfer it to the target server.

Running with Systemd

For production Linux servers, use systemd to ensure HitKeep starts on boot and restarts on failure.

1. Create a dedicated service user and data directory:

sudo useradd -r -s /bin/false hitkeep
sudo mkdir -p /var/lib/hitkeep/data /var/lib/hitkeep/archive
sudo chown -R hitkeep:hitkeep /var/lib/hitkeep

2. Create /etc/systemd/system/hitkeep.service:

[Unit]
Description=HitKeep Analytics
After=network.target

[Service]
Type=simple
User=hitkeep
Group=hitkeep
WorkingDirectory=/var/lib/hitkeep

# Sensitive values via environment (not visible in ps aux)
Environment="HITKEEP_JWT_SECRET=change-this-to-a-long-random-string"
Environment="HITKEEP_MAIL_PASSWORD=your-smtp-password"

# General configuration via flags
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/hitkeep \
  -public-url=https://analytics.example.com \
  -db=/var/lib/hitkeep/data/hitkeep.db \
  -archive-path=/var/lib/hitkeep/archive \
  -http=:8080

Restart=on-failure
RestartSec=5s

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Or use a drop-in environment file for secrets (more secure — keeps secrets out of the unit file):

sudo mkdir -p /etc/systemd/system/hitkeep.service.d
sudo tee /etc/systemd/system/hitkeep.service.d/secrets.conf << 'EOF'
[Service]
Environment="HITKEEP_JWT_SECRET=your-secret-here"
EOF
sudo chmod 600 /etc/systemd/system/hitkeep.service.d/secrets.conf

3. Enable and start:

sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl enable --now hitkeep
sudo systemctl status hitkeep

Backup

Your entire analytics database is a single file:

# Simple copy backup
cp /var/lib/hitkeep/data/hitkeep.db /backup/hitkeep-$(date +%Y%m%d).db

# Or sync to remote storage
rclone copy /var/lib/hitkeep/data/hitkeep.db remote:my-bucket/hitkeep/

Trusted Proxies — required if running behind a reverse proxy
Configuration Reference
Data Retention

Don’t want to manage systemd services, upgrades, and backups yourself? HitKeep Cloud → runs the binary in your chosen region (EU Frankfurt or US Virginia) with zero-downtime upgrades and automated backups.