Get Site Visitor Information With PHP

Cody Taylor — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 15:59:25 +0000

I wanted to do a few custom things with one of my site’s stats. PHP made this nice and simple with the $_SERVER array. When someone visits one of your scripts the $_SERVER array is automatically filled so as long as you know the keys then you can get all the information needed. These are the most useful items for identifying a visitor that I found in this using this array.

$_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] gives you their ip address.
$_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] is their user-agent (What browser they are using).
$_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'] is where they came from.
$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] is the page they want to view.

This data is kinda useless unless you put it in a database so here’s a create table mySQL statement.


$sql = "CREATE TABLE visitors (
      `visitor_id` mediumint(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
      `ip_address` VARCHAR(16)  NOT NULL,
      `user_agent` varchar(100) NOT NULL default '',
        `time_of_visit` TIMESTAMP NOT NULL DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP,
      `referrer` varchar(256) NOT NULL default '',
      `target_url` VARCHAR(256) NOT NULL,
      PRIMARY KEY  (`visitor_id`)      
  );";

If you’d like to explore the $_SERVER array more there is very detailed info at the php web site.

tech stuff » visitor information

Get Site Visitor Information With PHP