---
title: Basic Posthog API integration - Add A Feature
slug: basic-posthog-api-integration-add-a-feature
published_at: 2023-12-22 12:00:12 +0000
updated_at: 2026-03-04 20:12:52 +0000
summary: 
description: In this video, we'll work on a feature to integrate PostHog analytics into the Craftwork web application. We create a Rails model to store marketing attribution data from PostHog called TrafficSource. The job fetches session data from the PostHog API, parses it, and stores relevant marketing metadata like UTM parameters, click IDs, referrers etc. in the TrafficSource model. Tests are written to validate the parsing and storage of the session data. The integration will allow the business to analyze the marketing funnel and tie revenue back to different traffic sources like Facebook/Google ads.  #rubyonrails #ruby #rails
tags: [cjav_dev, web development tutorials, web development for beginners, vim, ruby, rails, javascript, ruby on rails, active record, ruby on rails tutorial, posthog, posthog api]
views: 1123
author: CJ Avilla
url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/basic-posthog-api-integration-add-a-feature
youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKszbOC3ABY
youtube_id: HKszbOC3ABY
embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/HKszbOC3ABY
thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/HKszbOC3ABY/hqdefault.jpg
type: video
---

# Basic Posthog API integration - Add A Feature

*Published: December 22, 2023*
*Views: 1123*

## Watch

[Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKszbOC3ABY)

[![Basic Posthog API integration - Add A Feature](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/HKszbOC3ABY/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKszbOC3ABY)

## Description

In this video, we'll work on a feature to integrate PostHog analytics into the Craftwork web application. We create a Rails model to store marketing attribution data from PostHog called TrafficSource. The job fetches session data from the PostHog API, parses it, and stores relevant marketing metadata like UTM parameters, click IDs, referrers etc. in the TrafficSource model. Tests are written to validate the parsing and storage of the session data. The integration will allow the business to analyze the marketing funnel and tie revenue back to different traffic sources like Facebook/Google ads.

#rubyonrails #ruby #rails

## Transcript

what's up welcome back in this episode we're going to build a feature into craft work we're going to build a little API integration we're working on our funnel today I thought I might take you along so let's Dive Right In the goal for this is to save some UTM prams and some other like marketing funnel attribution type things in our database so that we can look at okay this was a project that came in that generated X and we want to be able to tie that back to what was the source that this came from was it from a Facebook ad or was it from a a Google ad that we displayed so we use a tool called post hog for a bunch of product analytics and some other things and we have some post hog IDs for our funnels and the thing that we're actually storing is the idea of something called a session recording and I've got Postman up here we can fetch a session recording we need like the project ID from post hog and then also the ID of a session recording and this is all authenticated um with an API key we get back a bunch of stuff about the session recording like how long it recorded and some other things but what we're most interested in are these marketing properties so there's a bunch of different properties that are available about the session so what browser they used and was there UTM prams inside of that our goal for today is going to be to support in our rails application for taking that post hog recording session ID that we are receiving um when someone goes through estimate submission flow on the website we're going to take that and store it in the database so right now we have just the ID but we have a couple options right we could figure out what are all the properties that we might get from one of those objects and we could store a column in the database for path name and refer and initial OS and OS version and basically all of these different properties but some sessions are going to have much less data than others and because it's so free form and free flowing and it depends also on the source that someone's coming from if they're just going directly to the website or if they're going through a Google ad or something like the number of properties are going to change a lot so what I want to do is create a new model called traffic source and I want to dump all that Json into this meta blob that will contain everything that we know about that recording session we'll also keep track of the session ID this is going to be like our the external ID for this traffic Source going back to post hog if someday in the future we decided we want to use another Analytics tool or if we wanted to connect some other Analytics tool that pipes in here we could add a second external Channel with that external ID so for now we could just default this to post hog we'll want to know what URL on the marketing site were they on and did it include one of these different click IDs or one of these UTM prams and what was the referring domain so this data is a subset of what's available in the Json so I want to build some sort of like adapter or something that knows how to look at this data and extract these different pieces not all of them are available as properties so we'll have to do a little bit of URL wrangling and we'll have to do some of this in the background okay so let's get started by generating a model here so we'll say rails G model and this is going to be called a traffic Source it took me a while to figure out what I wanted to name this I had a little conversation with chat GPT so we're going to call we're going to give it an external okay what else does this thing have it has the meta which is going to be a Json blob and then or Json B which is not Json blob and then we want the URL we're going to want the G CID the FB CID the MS click oh it's this thing and then gbr all of these are going to be string values and they're all optional they don't necessarily exist okay okay all right I think that looks pretty good we might also want to add fetched at as a date time that way we know like when we most recently fetched this specific traffic Source if we think it's stale we can go refetch it but yeah actually we'll leave that for later let's start by generating this model let's open up the migration and see what we got here okay so the external ID we want to to add an index on that because we will be probably joining to that and we do want that to be unique okay this is going to be default to empty yeah I think the rest of this is actually optional so we'll just leave those the the rest as optional here um this one is going to be null false we must have an external ID if we create a traffic source and then I think that's yeah that's going to be probably it for now I could see an argument for adding indices for some of these other IDs if we need to join against some Google data or Facebook data eventually but for now this is good so we can run our migration with rails DB migrate okay that's going to create our traffic sources let's go look at our traffic Source object here so we are using the jumpstar pro starter template we've also added like this the concept of discard into the generators but I'm going to remove that let's call this a traffic Source yeah we'll leave it audited for now but I don't know if we actually need it to be audited and then we don't actually need to do any of these broadcasts because we're not going to have like views for traffic sources this is going to be purely for reporting purposes okay so now that we have this concept of a traffic Source object and it has an external ID what we can do is make a a job that will fetch and create a traffic source so we'll say rails G job fetch traffic source and okay and this is going to take in the external ID and probably also the channel maybe like the external Channel but for now this is all going to just be post hog if later on we wanted to have this support something else we could do some routing based on Channel all right so we need to find or create a traffic Source object with this ID and then we need to fetch the data from the API and update the traffic source with the data first thing first we'll say traffic source is traffic source. find or create by external ID that looks good okay so we'll come over here and that should have this external ID cool and then what we want to do is fetch the data from the API we're going to need to build a post hog client that we can use to interact with the post hog API so we can say rails G API client post hog and we can give this a few things now so we're going give it a URL of what is the URL here so the the base URL is going to be app. poos hog.com and let's just start with that okay so if we open up our post hog client now we should be good to go so this is going to be do freeze okay this was a change I had to make on every time I generated a client so I'm going to go update the generator to add freeze onto the end of these URLs so we're going to go to our client TT okay so when we generate this call freeze on the end of that thing all right in fact let's let's just test to make sure that's working so rails D API client post hog and then we'll regenerate it and it should have that Frozen string post hog client okay great so now it has freeze and lint is happy all right we don't actually need any of these we are just going to do a get request yeah we'll do maybe we'll support listing all sessions for a given project and we'll default the project to our like our main project here so this is going to be our project and what we want to do is send a request to slash session recordings and this is going to be our project ID and we can call this a recording session and then uh find recording session by project ID and ID and this is going to be the same thing here but now we're going to have the ID of the recording session and I don't know let's see if this works so we can open up rails console and we can use our post hog client notice that we're also generating this class method here that will initial the post hog client for us with the API token from credentials that's handy so that we don't always have to look up what's our API key I already actually put this in credentials I think oh the other thing is let's follow let's follow the best practices here so this ticket is already in progress we'll grab the the git Branch get checkout dasb or I think I already maybe created it oh okay then get Dash pop okay so that should have my credentials okay and then rails console here so if we do po hog client. client. recording sessions boom all right so we it made a request so let's see what our response looks like r. purst body all right we got a ton of data there all right so then par body and I think we get it back back when we fetch the list of recording sessions it's nested under results so we should be able to say results okay do first and this should be a recording session object stored as an open struct that's cool so then if we wanted to look at like r dot or yeah like session is that first one so we can do like session dot person yeah session. person. properties is going to give us all these properties and we can say gclid and that gives us the Google click ID that's pretty cool we can also look at UTM media T UTM medium Banner okay and then UTM Source was Google so it came from Google so that is pretty sweet okay so now what we want to try out is yeah if we do like session. ID that should give us back a session ID and now we should be able to also say using our post hog client can we grab a specific recording session find recording session by oh let's also pre-fill this project ID um with 27593 okay and reload okay so then we want to do po hog client. find recording session for the ID here and we should get back our firstbody doers. properties nice. GCL okay amazing great so we've got a little API client here that's going to work just fine for fetching data so in our fetch traffic source job we want this to fetch data from the API so this is going to be like our recording session is equal to PO hog client. session by ID external ID and that is going to come back with a full recording session object and I think we want to yeah for now we'll just update the traffic source with meta is going to be is there a way let's see r. original body r dot okay so we'll just pass r. body recording session. body in here and I think that should store that as expected then we want to set a bunch of other things so let's look at the traffic source and okay so we want to try to pull off and extract as much of the these as we can directly from the properties so let's also grab like the person data is going to be recording session. par body. person right R.P body. person okay and that should give us back a person or what's called a person object inside of post hog and I think the person object is going to have a lot of these things I believe we can do something like FB CID is person. properties. yeah UTM Source UTM medium campaign term content refering domain so co-pilot here is suggesting that we store the refer SE separate from the referring domain which makes me believe that we probably want to do that so let's go add that because that also sounds valuable so what I want to do is open up the migration for create traffic source and I'm going to add in here refer and then I think we can do rails DB migrate redo and it should roll it back and then Roll It Forward fantastic and now we should see refer here great all right what else do we want we want to have okay we want to have the G braid and the GCL ID and the MS K ID and the URL and the W raid okay so I know from looking at the data that some of these are actually not going to be available directly on properties but I like ideally W braid is someday on properties but we might have to pull some of these off of some other some other part of this data so if we look through all of our results here for a w braid you'll notice that like in this specific res result so for this this result here we have a w braid in the current url's properties and it's in the initial current URL but it's not in the properties like it's not in the person's properties directly also this is called current URL it's not called URL so we'll have to figure figure what we want to do there so initial current URL versus URL is there a big difference it looks like those are probably going to be the same let's look at if we can see some other examples okay so if we go down a little bit further here we have another example where the initial current URL and the current URL are the same and they both have this WB r a i d situation so I think we we might want to pull it off of this initial current URL so yeah so to do is pull W raid off of C.R Cur or like initial did I copy it no um dot initial query string prams okay we've made some good progress but before we go any further I do want to start adding some tests because this is like the kind of thing where we want to make sure that we're actually getting the data that we need that and that it's like creating these traffic Source objects as expected so let's go jump over into the job here and we'll start testing some stuff out so this is going to test that it creates a new traffic Source if none exists okay so we want to call fetch traffic Source job. perform now with 1 2 3 4 5 now we don't actually want to go out and hit the API when we call this but we do want to ensure that there's a difference in the number of traffic sources after we execute this so we'll run this and we're going to get some error that says hey you tried to make an API call and that's fine we can go oh okay duplicate key violates unique constraint this is because of our fixtures so our fixtures are generating some stuff that has an external ID equal to my string in and it should be unique all right so let's jump into the traffic source yaml file this is generated for us also and okay it looks like it didn't actually generate this it didn't know what Json looks like that's okay this I don't know this is somewhat suspicious let's go look at at our create traffic sources thing does this Json B yeah okay that should be fine all right and then our external ID this one should be like my string one two yeah one and this one needs to be my string two and they need to be unique and this should now maybe give us something different okay great so now it's failing because we're trying to make an external request and we're not allowed to do that in test which is fantastic we don't want to actually go out and hit API endpoints in test but but we can stub it so let's grab that and say here that we want to stub this request I don't actually usually include the headers here when I do this but we can yeah we can have it return this so there's two options right like one we could stub the post hog client so that it's not allowed to call this method or so that this method returns objects that we expect or we could go or we can stub the API call technically this job is going to use the post hog client and technically the post hog client should be making assertions about the types of requests that are going out yeah so let me show you what I mean if we go to the Post hog client this is going to have its own set of tests and here instead of authorization yeah we could test out that this is passing yeah when we call client. recording sessions we can assert that it's passing the right offhe headers when we initialize a new instance of a post hog client with the test token then it should make an API call to this SL API projects in fact we can pass in a project ID here of one two three so that we don't actually accidentally use our real project ID and yeah so this should slash session recordings so this specific test is this going to now pass okay great and then we can yeah we can come back and Implement a bunch of these later for rate limiting or other things that the API might support but for now we can keep it simple and let's just add a test for test sends correct request to fetch recording sessions so this is going to be again the like stub this request and cool and all right the other thing is that we can technically with web mock we can assert that a specific thing was requested and so stubbing it just prevents that it's getting called asserting that it was requested to make sure that the request actually happened for instance if we just comment this out and we run this test nothing fails nothing is going to happen because this stub request doesn't make any assertions and so this is only preventing that we're going to send anything outbound If instead we add this assert requested and we comment out the exercise so this is like setup exercise and then assertions or make sure that the code did what you think it did now we have failing expectation that like okay we wanted to see a get request but we didn't actually see one so that's how we can make sure that this is actually doing what we think it's doing okay so now we can also test that it like finds a recording session all right and this is going to do the same thing and thankfully yeah it's going to write it for me okay so that looks good all all right it passed how do we know that it's actually working one way would be to comment out our code that we think is working and then run it and watch it fail so we want to see that red green refactor type situation all right so now back back to our job back to our job so inside of our job here I think that we actually want to stub the API call so that we can return a specific body here that has stuff that we know will be extracted that way we can test that the parsing is working I don't know maybe the parsing should happen somewhere else too but potentially we have a post hog person object that gets this the person thing and then wraps it up and spits back what we expect let's yeah let's do the right thing let's do the right thing here so inside of our clients I'm going to add a new just plain old Ruby object called a po hog person. RB oops no it needs to be named that's what the class is going to be named but po hogp person. RB okay and in here we'll call create a class called post hog person and it's going to be initialized with person data just like raw the raw person object and then we want this to return the things that we are going to extract on the other side here okay we we'll want to open up test clients in here we're going to add a post hogerson test RB and this is going to basically be one just like this where we want to have our test helper uh okay so post hog person test and we're just going to say it extracts the the core properties as expected and what's nice here is then we can pass in post hogp person. new and then this can follow the exact stuff that we're getting back from here perhaps we grab this Json or yeah Arta body json. parse or puts art up body there we go now it's Json okay let's grab that and then here in our setup we'll have some like person data and maybe this is Json cool thing you can do from Vim is you can highlight a line and then go into execution mode and say JQ and use JQ to format the stuff that's in your buffer ah it's so cool all right so now this data we have this giant Json blob as person data and we want to use it so we like technically inside of our poog client when we fetch a recording session this like the response that we get back from this is being parsed by our application client so let's go look at the application client and um there's like this get method and it is using okay so it is using json.parse of that data and it's passing in the open struct class this is how it's serializing or deserializing the data into a this object that we can then use which is convenient so here what we can do inside of our test is we want [Music] to actually create some object so we have our person data let's actually just call that our Json and then we'll create a new like instance variable at person data that's going to be json.parse the Json with our object class object class is open struct okay so now this should look at person data this should look like basically the same thing that we're getting back from the API so now we can make assertions against this so we can assert yeah like this ID here should match one of these IDs up here this is actually like session data though session data so maybe we can do like session data. person we really only need to extract the bits that are required for the job so our job is the fetch traffic Source job and in here we are looking [Music] for yeah so this is going to be like Po hog person. new and we'll pass in this person data we'll get back a person object and then we should be able to call like let's actually make this like test FB C ID and then up here we will add in in properties so FB CID is test fbclid and this should have an FB CID directly on the person object and then when we run this we should get something back okay why is it failing expected a hash key not a hash close after person properties fbcl ID oh we're probably missing a comma or something oh it's ex it's quite picky about the how well for the Json is all right so now it's failing okay undefined method fbclid for post hog person great that's the failure that we want to see okay and now we can define a method fbcl ID which is going to come off of person properties fbcl ID okay got a passing test fantastic all right but rather than making a bunch of these methods we can do delegate yeah let's make a method here properties at person. properties and then we'll delegate like FB CID to properties and run this okay and then there's going to be a bunch that we're going to be able to delegate to properties but some that we are not so let's just check FB C ID uh no results got GCL IDs all right let's start with GCL IDs GCL IDs so we're going to change this to GID is it GID G fbid how do you say that I don't know okay all right next up is going to be yeah let's split this and look at our tra fetch traffic Source job all right G braid so if we look at our data G braid okay so G braid is one of the examples where it's not available in the properties it's only available in this either in the start URL or in the current URL or initial current URL so we want to grab that in initial current URL which is going to be at I don't know if that's actually going to work as expected so let's just see if it does so initial current URL so I'm going to make this actually yeah yes let's keep all this stuff in here and we'll make this example.com and I want to assert equal all of that that stuff in the initial current URL and let's just see if that pulls it out as expected it does not it's nil and so I'm wondering if openstruct is going to let us do this as expected so if we do json.parse this thing with object class op struct and then we say d dot o um Initial D do initial current URL no yeah so it doesn't like that the dollar sign at the beginning uh D.P person. properties dot initial current URL yeah that's not going to be that's not going to fly that is not going to fly so let's see if we can use okay great so just using like the string indexing or like object whatever it's called object accessor syntax square brackets should maybe give us that back let's see our test moo all right did I just moo I mooed uh I was going to say boom and then I was going to say oh I don't know something else with an m okay all right we've got our Google click ID we've got our current URL what I wanted to do with this current URL though was like extract out some query string parameters yeah query string programs for URL in Ruby there's likely going to be a URI parse method or something that we can use to get back the query string prams CGI dopar I don't want to do that okay here we go parse nested query racku tills yeah yeah okay so we I think we want to use U.P parse let's see now we've got this URL back so let's say the URL is this thing U.P parse urlquery okay so that gives us the query string and then we want to use this rtils parse query probably let's see and nice okay great so that's going to give us some more properties I'm almost wondering if we want to do properties. merge with [Music] some current URL quars or something defa current URL yeah query prams and then we can just do that current URL query prams query query okay so let's do this thing racky tills parse query URI parse URL for the initial current url. query okay we're making a lot of assumptions here one is that this is going to exist another is that so we could say if it if this is if it's blank then return a empty dictionary and that'll be fine because that'll merge with properties and then yeah so another thing we could do here is um yeah test out that this is going to work by checking like we can add something custom in here so we can say x equals one and check to see like assert equal or assert in let's see seert hash contains key with root Ruby mini test just want to see if it has the key assert has keys has keys the person. properties should have X or is that how it works assert has keys I don't know undefined method merge for openstruct oh no open struct doesn't have a merge method why not okay okay so so properties maybe we just have to keep them separate that's fine that's all right okay so then yeah we don't need this this assertion here all right I think we're going to be able to get the fbcl ID fine the GB ID is going to come off of the query params so let's make a method gbre and this is going to come off of here yep and then we'll do the same thing Ms click ID Ms Ms click yeah I don't think I am not seeing this do the same thing for that I think we can pass the referer okay in this case the referer is going to be oh that came from YouTube interesting all right so the referer is going to be on Prop properties but this one has a dollar sign so we want to make a method probably so we'll say yeah properties and do we want the refer or the initial refer I don't know probably the initial one and then same thing with referring domain all right and okay we're making progress over here but we're not testing it so let's comment this out all right all right we want to test the G braid ID test G braid ID and that's going to come off of the current URL so our current URL if it has a g braid of test G braid all right and then are we using yeah we're using initial current URL all right here we go okay so does this work undei method G braid see if we can get it to pass by commenting this back in okay now our actual and whatever URLs are off that's okay all right so then let's work on Ms click ID is that what it's actually called Ms yeah I guess it is MS CLK ID so we will again look in the query prams for that because this is I think the initial current URL is going to be the most consistent mscl K ID is test okay same thing is that what we called it in the graic source Ms CLK ID yeah okay just checking all right all right let's test the refer this should fail this should pass all right now we need to test the referring domain this should pass commented it in too quickly okay and what else do we want we want the oh all the UTM stuff and the W braid assert equal test w braid okay so that's also I think okay that's also going to be on the URLs so we can come up here and add W braid equal to test W braid should still fail because we haven't implemented it and then doing this should pass okay and then UTM campaign content medium Source term all right let's see if copilot can do this for us and does this one have UTM all right so we've got UTM medium Source campaign on here so we're going to assert equal person. UTM campaign is that and fails because these are going to be in properties I think we can do UTM campaign like this and delegate it down to the properties okay great and then search well UTM content did we put UTM content on the traffic Source we did okay all right so yeah we'll do all five content medium Source Campa or term and then uh our data up here doesn't actually have uh content test content I don't actually know what UTM content or term would do but we're going to just pop them in there UTM content or test content and and test term run the test okay we're probably yeah we've got a extra comma here doesn't like trailing commas that's all right Json it's all right okay looking pretty good let's grab our current URL update it run our tests boom okay I'm actually going to remove that assertion because that's fragile and if we want to add stuff later it might break it so now let's assume that we have a post hog person that knows how to parse post hog person objects and we will yeah so we're g to we've got this post hog person object and now we're basically just going to pass down these properties of the post hog person object I want to keep meta separate because that's going to reflect that it's just like the Json from the thing otherwise the rest of these should be that one is actually going to be called I don't know should we just rename this thing to URL yeah let's just call it URL simpler keep it simple keep it simple okay and then UTM campaign UTM content all right hey I think we've got a job that will take in an ID create a traffic Source update it based on the data that we get back from an API I don't know let's give it a whir we've written a lot of code we've written some tests with that code but we haven't actually run any of it yet I'm going to grab one of these IDs one of these session IDs and and just for fun we're going to say tra fetch traffic Source job fetch tra perform now passing in that ID let's just see what happens okay hey awesome awesome we got a crash which is fine undefined method fbclid for post hog person hey that's like something that we just worked on isn't it okay so if we go back to post dog person FB C ID okay we definitely did everything except that one right okay so I promise we had this one somewhere FB C FBC oh you know what I like removed it and then yeah okay that's fine so we'll just pop that onto our current URL here FB CID I think test yeah I'm not sure if that will be in Properties or not but it should definitely be in the URL so we can let's watch our test fail all right and then let's watch it pass here I think okay so yeah reload and then refire boom oh my goodness okay what have we got in our traffic source. count all right we got one our last one it has all this data is this meta thing going to work as expected meta let's print that out hey that looks like actual Json if we wanted to could we say something like json. parse this thing wow nice okay and if we look at traffic. last okay hey we've got got a UTM Source UTM medium campaign this is looking great a bunch of stuff is getting parsed out and we've got the external ID here that is fantastic I'm pretty happy with that okay all right what else I think yeah we might we've got to go through and set up our API keys for production and then run a few different tests I think also locally I'll probably use the maintenance tasks G to build a migration that will go out and hit the API to refetch a bunch of existing traffic Source objects that we have we'll be able to backfill and make associations between things happening in our marketing funnel as always thanks so much for watching and we'll see you in the next one cheers

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