Add PostHog analytics #124
Conversation
There was a problem hiding this comment.
Two points
- As far as I can tell, this will not work in production. We do not set
NODE_ENV=productionfor the API in production (or if we do, I don't know where it happens). - Aren't events conventionally defined as variable names instead of descriptions, like
srcbook:startedinstead of "user started the srcbook application" ? In all the metrics products i used, there were short event names that acted as keys and you could associate descriptions with them, but that made it more consistent / less error prone to reuse events in a code base. Also, it feels like it would be easier to query in the analytics product?
packages/web/src/routes/settings.tsx
Outdated
| <div> | ||
| <h2 className="text-xl pb-2">Analytics tracking</h2> | ||
| <label className="opacity-70 block pb-2"> | ||
| We track behavior analytics to improve the Srcbook product. We track no personal |
There was a problem hiding this comment.
We track behavioral analytics to improve Srcbook. We do not track any personally identifiable information (PII).
|
On your 2 points:
|
| @@ -1,3 +1,7 @@ | |||
| #!/usr/bin/env node | |||
|
|
|||
| import '../index.mjs'; | |||
| process.env.NODE_ENV = 'production'; | |||
There was a problem hiding this comment.
Can we use dotenv here, or some other more standard way? We're going to eventually want to set more flags in prod anyways.
There was a problem hiding this comment.
Mind if I do this in a follow up? This PR is already blown up a bit.
| process.env.NODE_ENV = 'production'; | ||
|
|
||
| (async () => { | ||
| await import('../index.mjs'); |
There was a problem hiding this comment.
Is using await here necessary? And if it is, why do we need to wrap it in a function? We use node with top-level await I thought?
There was a problem hiding this comment.
I'm not sure about using await, but the dynamic import is important, otherwise it gets run before setting the process.env.NODE_ENV.
I don't think there's anything wrong with the current syntax?
This PR introduces posthog analytics for Srcbook. It's an opt-out mechanism, but we don't collect any PII data. Location tracking is disabled, and the only metrics we collect are behavioral and explicit, in the goal of improving the Srcbook application.
The user can disable tracking in settings.
I added some copy about this in the README. Down the line we might want a more formal document about the data we collect.
I collect on the node side of things (rather than the web side of things). This is a debatable option. It's great for source of truth, but won't help us understand things like clicks / pageViews, etc... It has the advantage of not being able to be blocked by ad-blockers, and won't show up in the network tab.
I do not collect in dev (I guard on
NODE_ENV === production)Testing
This was tested manually, checking that it behaves correctly when enabled and disabled.
Events
To begin, we track the following events: