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Ahoy.js

🔥 Visit and event tracking for JavaScript

  • Easily track unique visitors
  • Track events across page navigation

Use it with any backend. For Rails, check out the Ahoy gem.

Installation

Download ahoy.js and include it on your page.

<script src="ahoy.js"></script>

Or use Yarn:

yarn add ahoy.js

And import it with:

import ahoy from 'ahoy.js';

How It Works

When someone lands on your website, they are assigned a visit token and a visitor token.

The visit token expires after 4 hours, in which a new visit is created. Visits are useful for tracking metrics like monthly active users. The visitor token expires after 2 years. A POST request is sent to /ahoy/visits with:

  • visit_token
  • visitor_token
  • referrer
  • landing_page

The server can capture:

  • ip
  • user_agent
  • user - from app authentication

And calculate things like:

  • referring_domain and search_keyword from referrer
  • utm_source, utm_medium, utm_term, utm_content, and utm_campaign from landing_page
  • city, region, and country from ip
  • browser, os, and device_type from user_agent

Events

Track events with:

ahoy.track(name, properties);

A POST request is sent to /ahoy/events with:

  • name
  • properties
  • time

The server can capture:

  • visit_token - from cookies
  • user - from app authentication

As a precaution, the server should reject times that do not match:

1 minute ago < time <= now

All Events

Track all views and clicks with:

ahoy.trackAll();

Set the page with:

ahoy.configure({page: "Landing page"});

And sections with:

<div data-section="Header">
  <a href="/home">Home</a>
</div>

These are included in event properties if set.

Views

ahoy.trackView();

Name - $view

Properties

  • url - https://www.streamflip.com
  • title - Streamflip

Clicks

ahoy.trackClicks();

Name - $click

Properties

  • tag - a
  • id - account-link
  • class - btn btn-primary
  • text - View Account
  • href - /account

Submits

ahoy.trackSubmits();

Name - $submit

Changes

ahoy.trackChanges();

Name - $change

Development

Ahoy is built with developers in mind. You can run the following code in your browser’s console.

Force a new visit

ahoy.reset(); // then reload the page

Log messages

ahoy.debug();

Turn off logging

ahoy.debug(false);

Configuration

Here’s the default configuration:

ahoy.configure({
  urlPrefix: "",
  visitsUrl: "/ahoy/visits",
  eventsUrl: "/ahoy/events",
  page: null,
  platform: "Web",
  useBeacon: true,
  startOnReady: true,
  trackVisits: true,
  cookies: true,
  cookieDomain: null,
  headers: {},
  visitParams: {},
  withCredentials: false,
  visitDuration: 4 * 60, // 4 hours
  visitorDuration: 2 * 365 * 24 * 60 // 2 years
});

When trackVisits is set to false, Ahoy.js will not attempt to create a visit on the server, but assumes that the server itself will return visit and visitor cookies.

Subdomains

To track visits across multiple subdomains, use:

ahoy.configure({cookieDomain: "yourdomain.com"});

Users

Ahoy automatically associates users with visits and events if the user is authenticated on the server.

If you use cookies for authentication and the JavaScript library is on the same subdomain as the server, no additional configuration is needed.

If you use cookies and the JavaScript library is on a different domain or subdomain as the server, set:

ahoy.configure({withCredentials: true});

This will send credentials such as cookies, authorization headers or TLS client certificates to the server.

If you use headers for authentication, pass them with:

ahoy.configure({headers: {"Authorization": "Bearer ..."}});

Fetch

If you use the Fetch API to make requests and the JavaScript library is on a different domain or subdomain as the server, Ahoy cookies are not sent to the server by default. You can pass the info in headers with:

fetch(url, {
  headers: {"Ahoy-Visit": ahoy.getVisitId(), "Ahoy-Visitor": ahoy.getVisitorId()}
});

History

View the changelog

Contributing

Everyone is encouraged to help improve this project. Here are a few ways you can help:

To get started with development:

git clone https://github.com/ankane/ahoy.js.git
cd ahoy.js
yarn install
yarn build