An efficient way to track user login dates and IPs history

devise, ruby-on-rails-3

Solution

I hate answering my own questions, especially given that you both gave helpful answers. I think answering my question with the approach I took might help others, in combination with your answers.

I've been playing with the Impressionist Gem (the only useful page view Gem since the abandoned RailStat) with good results so far. After setting up the basic migration, I found that the expected usage follows Rail's MVC design very closely. If you add "impressionist" to a Controller, it will go looking for the Model when logging the page view to the database. You can modify this behaviour or just call impressionist yourself in your Controller (or anywhere really) if you're like me and happen to be testing it out on a Controller that doesn't have a Model.

Anyways, I got it working with Devise to track successful logins by overriding the Devise::SessionsController and just calling the impressionist method for the @current_member: (don't forget to check if it's nil! on failed login)

class TestSessionController < Devise::SessionsController
  def create
    if not @current_member.nil?
      impressionist(@current_member)
    end
    super
  end
end

Adding it to other site parts later for some limited analytics is easy to do. The only other thing I had to do was update my routes to use the new TestSessionController for the Devise login route:

post 'login' => 'test_session#create', :as => :member_session

Devise works like normal without having to modify Devise in anyway, and my impressionist DB table is indexed and logging logins. I'll just need a rake task later to trim it weekly or so.

Now I just need to work out how to chart daily logins without having to write a bunch of looping, dirty queries...

Problem

I'm trying to track user login history for stat purposes but its not clear to me what the best way to go about it would be. I could have a separate table that records users and their login stats with a date, but that table could get REALLY big. I could track some historic fields in the User model/object itself in a parse-able field and just update it (them) with some delimited string format. e.g. split on :, get the last one, if an included date code isn't today, add an item (date+count) otherwise increment, then save it back. At least with this second approach it would be easy to remove old items (e.g. only keep 30 days of daily logins, or IPs), as a separate table would require a task to delete old records. I'm a big fan of instant changes. Tasks are useful, but can complicate things for maintenance reasons. Anyone have any suggestions? I don't have an external data caching solution up or anything yet. Any pointers are also welcome! (I've been hunting for similar questions and answers) Thanks!

Original source