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What is Mixpanel (the service) ?Mixpanel is a real-time analytics service that helps companies understand how users interact with web applications. mixpanel.com
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What does this Gem do?-
Track events with properties directly from your backend.
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Track events with properties through javascript using a rack middleware.
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How to install?gem install mixpanel
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How to use it with a Rails application?In your environment config file add this.
Rails::Initializer.run do |config| config.middleware.use "Mixpanel::Tracker::Middleware", "YOUR_MIXPANEL_API_TOKEN"
If you want to use the asynchronous version of Mixpanel’s javascript API
Rails::Initializer.run do |config| config.middleware.use "Mixpanel::Tracker::Middleware", "YOUR_MIXPANEL_API_TOKEN", :async => true
By default the scripts are inserted into the head of the html response. If you’d prefer the scripts to run after all rendering has completed you can set the insert_js_last flag and they’ll be added at the end of the body tag. This will work whether or not you opt for the aynchronous version of the API. However, when inserting js into an ajax response it will have no effect:
Rails::Initializer.run do |config| config.middleware.use "Mixpanel::Tracker::Middleware", "YOUR_MIXPANEL_API_TOKEN", :async => true, :insert_js_last => true
In your application_controller class add a method to instance mixpanel.
before_filter :initialize_mixpanel def initialize_mixpanel @mixpanel = Mixpanel::Tracker.new("YOUR_MIXPANEL_API_TOKEN", request.env, true) end
Then in each request you want to track some event you can use:
To track events directly from your backend…
@mixpanel.track_event("Sign in", {:some => "property"})
To track events after response with javascript…
@mixpanel.append_event("Sign in", {:some => "property"})
To execute any javascript API call
@mixpanel.append_api("register", {:some => "property"}) @mixpanel.append_api("identify", "Unique Identifier")
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Resque and Rails exampleIf you don’t want to use the built in Mixpanel Gem async feature bellow there is an example about how to make async calls using Resque.
Resque is a Redis-backed Ruby library for creating background jobs
class MixpanelTrackEventJob @queue = :slow def mixpanel(request_env) Mixpanel.new(MIXPANEL_TOKEN, request_env) end def perform(name, params, request_env) mixpanel(request_env).track_event(name, params) end end class UsersController < ApplicationController def create @user = User.new(params[:user]) if @user.save MixpanelTrackEventJob.enqueue("Sign up", {:invited => params[:invited]}, request.env) redirect_to user_root_path else render :new end end end
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NotesThere are two forms of async operation:
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Using MixpanelMiddleware, events are queued via Mixpanel#append_event and inserted into a JavaScript block within the HTML response.
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Using Mixpanel.new(…, …, true), events are sent to a subprocess via a pipe and the sub process which asynchronously send events to Mixpanel. This process uses a single thread to upload events, and may start dropping events if your application generates them at a very high rate.
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Deprecation NotesFor a short term this method will be accepted but it will be deprecated soon.
Mixpanel.new
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CollaborationsAll collaborations are welcome to this project, please fork and make a pull request.