Snowpack

Webpack your Snowplow JS tracking.

While the official snowplow documentation recommends setting up their JS tracker via Google Tag Manager, if you have tons of tags and dependencies on your website this will significantly increase the delay between the moment when a user lands on one of your pages and the moment when events are sent.

There are workarounds to this (such as using localStorage to store events that haven't been sent), but tackling the issue at its root may be a good idea.

Snowpack tries to answer this problem by providing an efficient way of integrating a small (around 10 kB with one tracker setup) script to your pages that will instanciate trackers as fast as possible.

It also includes some goodies such as:

• ES6 Promise objects so you can get the magic going (yes, they are polyfilled).
• Minified, Uglified script once built so you don't overuse your user's bandwidth.
• Cool names: admit it, writing window.addEventListener('winterIsComing', /* tracking stuff */); is fun.

Right now, you can only define trackers with Snowpack, but one day you will be able to do things like (contributions welcome):

• Track simple events (pageview, structured events) with contexts.
• Even more ES6 goodness: window.makeItSnow().then((snow) => { snow.trackPageView( /* */ )}).catch((ice) => { console.warn(ice) }) looks good, right?

Prerequisites

Create the src/lib/secure/trackers.json file. Add your tracker definition like the following:

[
  {
    "trackerName": "greatTracker",
    "collectorHostname": "my.collector.com",
    "options": {
      "appId": "myApp",
      "encodeBase64": true,
      "cookieDomainRemove": "stringToRemovefromHostname",
      "contexts": {
        "optimizelyStates": true,
        "webPage": true,
        "performanceTiming": true
      }
    }
  }
]

• If you omit options.appId, it will be set to your domain, stripped from any www. and with . changed to - (eg. www.google.com will become google-com).
• You can either specify a cookieDomain option or not. If you omit it, it will be set to the hostname without www.. You can also specify a cookieDomainRemove string that will be removed from the hostname (eg. finance.google.com will become google.com if you set this option to finance.).

Run devserver

docker-compose up

Open <your-docker-ip>:8080.

Open up src/index.html to understand what's happening.

Build

./scripts/build.sh