Ask HN: Determine what website client was on

[ge96]

I don't know why I'm not sure if you can do this.

I just want to know for analytics purpose where a connecting client came from. Is that something you would know from say HTTP?

I use PHP right now for backend. I can get IP/requested URL, I just for some reason assumed you can do this. I mean if you think about Google they are running a browser so this information is probably easy to get/makes sense to have.

But I mean when you leave one server, how would another server know which server you were just connected to?

[gt565k]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_referer

[ge96 → gt565k]

Thanks

[joshyi]

Use something like https://goaccess.io

[timdavila]

In PHP, you're looking for

  $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']

[ge96 → timdavila]

Nice! I saw this in a StackOverflow post, it's odd that it would work that way don't you think? (probably not) but I think say you are A, and you connected to B (Facebook) and you then connect to C (YouTube), why would you not see A instead of seeing B at C?

Anyway thanks