How To Count Visits In PHP

This tutorial will show you how you can create a counter in PHP that will keep track and display your number of visitors on a website. I will present two ways of doing this: first one would be to use a MySQL a data to keep the nr. of files, and second one to store the nr. in a file.

First we create our table in counter database:

<?php $hostname="localhost"; $username="root"; $password="root"; $db="counter "; $conex=mysql_connect($hostname,$username,$password) or die ("Database error connection"); mysql_select_db($db , $conex) or die("Error : ".mysql_error()); mysql_query("CREATE TABLE visitors( count INT(8))")or die("Error: ".mysql_error()); mysql_query("INSERT INTO visitors (count) VALUES ('0')"); mysql_close($conex); ?>

The code above is meant to make a short review on how to connect to a database and perform a query. This can be achieve also using
phpMyAdmin which is a faster way to do it. Count is of type Int(8) which can store a value up to 99.999.999. Also I reset the counter
to 0 using INSERT query.

<?php $hostname="localhost"; $username="root"; $password="root"; $db="counter"; $conex=mysql_connect($hostname,$username,$password) or die ("I cannot connect to database"); mysql_select_db($db , $conex) or die("Error: ".mysql_error()); mysql_query("UPDATE visitors SET count = count+1"); $counter = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM visitors"); print " <table border=1 cellpadding=3 cellspacing=0 width=80>“;<br /> for($i = 0;$i < mysql_num_rows($counter);$i = $i+1) { print " <tr>“;<br /> $field = mysql_result($counter, $i, count);<br /> print “</p> <td align=right><font face=arial size=2>$field</font></td> <p>“;<br /> print “</tr> <p>“;<br /> print “</table> <p>“;<br /> }<br /> mysql_close($conex);<br /> ?>

I will explain the PHP code: When a visitor enters on the page I’m connecting to the database and I add + 1 to the existing value. After that
I retrieve the number of visitors and display the value in a single cell table. We can put this into a counter.php file for example and include
it using include directive where we want to be displayed.

The second approach in how to make a PHP counter would be to use a file.

<?php $myfile = ("visitors.txt"); $visitors = file($myfile); $visitors[0] ++; $open_file = fopen($myfile , "w"); fputs($open_file , "$visitors[0]"); fclose($open_file); echo "You are visitor nr. $visitors[0]"; ?>

In this simple code I am opening visitors.txt the in an array. Then I increment with +1 the value of existing number and write it into the file.
The file that you will use must have 777 rights. After that I simply display the value. You can put this also in a file and include it as with
the MySQL version.

A link to see how PHP counts the nr. of visitors :
http://andreic.eu/tutorials/2
Thank you reading this tutorial!