Quick Start
PXTA audits the tracking on a website and writes a report you can read, file or send on. This page takes you from nothing to your first report in a few minutes.
1. Get PXTA and a Browser
Download the archive for your system from the download page, unpack it and put pxta somewhere on your PATH. PXTA drives a browser you already have: Google Chrome, Chromium or Microsoft Edge. Check it’s all there:
pxta version
pxta catalog
The second command lists the ten trackers PXTA recognises by name.
2. Run an Audit
pxta audit https://www.example.com
PXTA visits up to 20 pages of the site, following its links three deep. If the site shows a cookie banner, every page is loaded three times: with the banner left alone, after PXTA rejects, and after it accepts. Each pass starts with a fresh browser profile, so nothing carries over from one to the next. Every page takes a few seconds per pass, longer on busy pages and with the one-second pause PXTA leaves between pages.
The terminal shows each page as it goes, then a summary: how many findings of each severity, the consent platform, the first findings, and where the report is.
3. Read the Report
Open pxta-report/report.html in any browser. It has five parts:
- Findings, the most serious first. Each is one sentence, such as On /checkout/confirm, the Meta Pixel sent an email address inside the page address before the consent banner was answered. Open “Evidence” under it to see the request, every field PXTA decoded with the flagged one highlighted, the time, and the command that reproduces it.
- Trackers on the site, with the pages each one sent data from in each pass.
- Consent behaviour, one line per tracker: quiet before an answer, quiet after a reject, and sending after an accept is what a correctly set up tag looks like.
- Pages visited, with how many requests each sent.
- Method: the browser, the settings, what PXTA can’t see, and the checksum of
requests.har.
findings.json holds the same findings for scripts, and requests.har holds every request, for any HAR viewer.
The sample reports show what this looks like on four made-up sites.
4. Point It Where It Matters
Most problems sit on a few pages: the order confirmation, the account pages, anything about health or money, and the site’s own search. Point PXTA at them:
pxta audit https://shop.example/checkout/confirm?order=123 --pages 1
pxta audit https://clinic.example --sitemap https://clinic.example/sitemap.xml --pages 50
pxta audit https://shop.example --email [email protected]
--email adds an address whose SHA-256 and MD5 hashes PXTA looks for, which catches tags that hash an address before sending it. PXTA already types its own marker address, [email protected], into email fields it finds, without submitting anything, so tags that read form fields show up too.
5. Useful Options
| Option | What it does |
|---|---|
--out folder |
Where the report goes (default pxta-report) |
--pages 20, --depth 3 |
How many pages, and how many links deep |
--sitemap url |
Add pages from a sitemap |
--passes reject,accept |
Report only some of the consent passes (the unanswered pass still runs, to find the pages) |
--idle 2s, --wait 15s |
How long to watch each page |
--resume |
Carry on an audit that was interrupted |
--no-fill |
Don’t type into email fields |
--ignore-robots |
Visit pages robots.txt disallows, on your own site only |
The reference lists every rule and finding code.