🕵️Pixel Tracker

A tracking pixel to track email opens and gather IP info of the email client.

Overview

A pixel tracker is a small, invisible image (usually 1x1 pixel) embedded in an email, webpage, or ad that tracks user behavior. When a user interacts with the content containing the pixel, it sends data back to the server, allowing marketers and businesses to gather insights into user actions, such as whether an email was opened, a link was clicked, or a purchase was made.

The above project serves a static web page with a pixel. When a user opens the email or web page with the embedded pixel, the User-Agent string, timestamp, and IP Address are logged to the tracker_log.txt file.

🌐Deploy in EC2

Create an EC2 instance with http traffic allowed. SSH into the cloud instance.

Install Python Virtualenv

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install python3-venv

Activate the new virtual environment in a new directory

source /venv/bin/activate

Create Directory

mkdir trackingPixel
cd trackingPixel

Clone Pixel Tracker repository

git clone https://github.com/JeffrinE/pixel-tracker.git

Create the virtual environment

python3 -m venv venv

Activate the virtual environment

source venv/bin/activate

Install requirements

pip install -r requirements.txt

Verify if it works by running

cd app
python flaskapp.py

Run Gunicorn:

gunicorn -b 0.0.0.0:8000 flaskapp:app 

Gunicorn is running (Ctrl + C to exit gunicorn)!

sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/tracker.service

Then add this into the file.

[Unit]
Description= Gunicorn instance to serve tracking pixel
After=network.target
[Service]
User=ubuntu
Group=www-data
WorkingDirectory=/home/ubuntu/trackingPixel/app
ExecStart=/home/ubuntu/trackingPixel/venv/bin/gunicorn -b localhost:8000 flaskapp:app
Restart=always
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Then enable the service:

sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl start tracker
sudo systemctl enable tracker

Check if the app is running with

curl localhost:8000

Run Nginx Webserver to accept and route request to Gunicorn Finally, we set up Nginx as a reverse-proxy to accept the requests from the user and route it to gunicorn. Install Nginx

sudo apt-get nginx

Start the Nginx service and go to the Public IP address of your EC2 on the browser to see the default nginx landing page

sudo systemctl start nginx
sudo systemctl enable nginx

Edit the default file in the sites-available folder.

sudo nano /etc/nginx/sites-available/default

Replace the default content with content of nginx_config.txt

sudo cat nginx_config.txt > /etc/nginx/sites-available/default

Restart Nginx

sudo systemctl restart nginx

Go to http://ec2-publicDNS.amazonaws.com to see the index page with text "Set to go".

📧Embedding

The project allows pixel emeddings with or without id for recognition.

http://ec2-publicDNS.amazonaws.com/pixel

The above url has no id, still can be used for tracking.

http://ec2-publicDNS.amazonaws.com/pixel/<id>

Id can have any Alpha-Numerical character sequence.

Embed the url as an image in an email or a webpage to track clicks.

<img src="http://ec2-publicDNS.amazonaws.com/pixel" alt="">
or
<img src="http://ec2-publicDNS.amazonaws.com/pixel/id" alt="">

The IPs of clients are logged in the track_log.txt file in the server.