Opinionated Pyramid integration with Mixpanel, a user behavioural analytics platform and CRM.
Project description
Integrate your Pyramid app with Mixpanel to learn who your users are and how they are using your app.
Opinionated Mixpanel (and Customer.io) integration
The reason this package exists is to provide sane defaults when integrating with Mixpanel. Instead of chasing down event name typos and debugging why tracking does not work, you can focus on learning what is important to your users.
- You never have typo-duplicated events in Mixpanel, because every event name comes from a dataclass, never from a string that can be miss-typed by mistake.
- Same for properties. Like events, properties are hardcoded as dataclasses.
- All "special" and "reserved" events and properties are already provided, no need to chase them down in various Mixpanel docs.
- Your app never stops working if Mixpanel is down, but you still get errors in your logs so you know what is going on.
- You never forget to call
flush()
on the events buffer, sincepyramid_mixpanel
hooks into the request life-cycle and callsflush()
at the end of the request processing. - You defer sending events until the entire request is processed successfully, i.e. never send events like "User added a thing" if adding the thing to DB failed at a later stage in the request life-cycle.
NOTE: At the end of 2021, Mixpanel is sunsetting their Email Messages feature. Since we rely heavily on those at
Niteo, we are adding Customer.io integration into this library, to replace Mixpanel's Email Messages. If you don't want to use Customer.io, nothing changes for you, just keep using pyramid_mixpanel
as always. If you do want to use Customer.io, then
install this package as pyramid_mixpanel[customerio]
and add the following registry settings. Then all profile_set
and track
calls will get automatically replicated to Customer.io. Other calls such as profile_append
will only send to Mixpanel.
customerio.tracking.site_id: <secret>
customerio.tracking.api_key: <secret>
customerio.tracking.region: <eu OR us>
If you want to skip sending some track
or profile_set
calls to Customer.io, add the skip_customerio=True
as a function parameter.
Features
- Builds on top of https://mixpanel.github.io/mixpanel-python/.
- Provides a handy
request.mixpanel.*
helper for sending events and setting profile properties. - Makes sure to call
.flush()
at the end of request life-cycle. - Provides dataclasses for events and properties, to avoid typos.
- You can roll your own
Consumer
, for example one that schedules a background task to send events, to increase request processing speed, since HTTP requests to Mixpanel are offloaded to a background task. - Provides a MixpanelQuery helper to use JQL to query Mixpanel for data. Some common queries like one for getting profiles by email are included.
- In local development and unit testing, all messages are stored as plain dicts in
request.mixpanel.mocked_messages
. This makes writing integration tests a breeze. By default, these dicts omit "library" properties such astoken
,time
,mp_lib
and similar, to make tests less verbose. If you need them, setMockedConsumer.DROP_SYSTEM_MESSAGE_PROPERTIES
toTrue
. - Automatically sets Mixpanel tracking
distinct_id
ifrequest.user
exists. Otherwise, you need to set it manually withrequest.mixpanel.distinct_id = 'foo'
.
Getting started
-
Declare
pyramid_mixpanel
as a dependency in your Pyramid project. -
Include the following lines:
config.include("pyramid_mixpanel")
-
Tell mixpanel_mixpanel how you want to use it:
# for local development and unit testing # events will be stored in request.mixpanel.mocked_messages mixpanel.token = false # minimal configuration mixpanel.token = <TOKEN> # enable support for querying Mixpanel data mixpanel.api_secret = <SECRET> # custom events and properties mixpanel.events = myapp.mixpanel.Events mixpanel.event_properties = myapp.mixpanel.EventProperties mixpanel.profile_properties = myapp.mixpanel.ProfileProperties # defer sending of Mixpanel messages to a background task queue mixpanel.consumer = myapp.mixpanel.QueuedConsumer # enable logging with structlog pyramid_heroku.structlog = true
For view code dealing with requests, a pre-configured request.mixpanel
is available.
Design defense
The authors of pyramid_openapi3
believe that while Mixpanel allows sending schema-less data, that can change as requirements for the project change, it is better to be precise about what "events" you send and what the properties of those events will be called. Same for "profiles". Here are the reasons that accumulated over 5 years of using Mixpanel at Niteo:
a) There will be typos in event and property names. They will clutter your Mixpanel dashboard and slow you down.
b) There will be differently named events for similar actions sent from different parts of your codebase. Then in your Mixpanel dashboard you'll have User Clicked Button
and Button Clicked
events in you won't be sure which to use, and what's the difference between them.
c) Your events and properties will not be consistently named, because they will be sent from different parts of your codebase, by different authors. Your Mixpanel dashboard will feel somewhat "broken" because some events will be in past tense (User Logged In
), some in all lowers caps (generated invoice
), some with only the action verb (click
) and so on.
All issues outlined above are alleviated using this package because all event & property names are defined as dataclasses, in a single source of truth manner. No typos are possible once the initial specification is done. You immediately recognize bad naming patterns because all event & property names are in a single file.
Naming best practice
In order to have nice and consistent event and property names, the authors of this package suggest using the following guidelines when coming up with names:
- Use the
<item> <action>
format in past tense, i.e.Button Clicked
,Page Viewed
,File Downloaded
. - Use Title Case.
- Frontend only sends two Mixpanel events:
Button/Link Clicked
andPage Viewed
. We then construct custom events such asPassword Reset Button Clicked
orPricing Page Viewed
inside Mixpanel dashboard based on button name, URL, etc. Custom events can be modified retroactively, regular events cannot. - Backend sends "action" events, when those actions finish successfully, such as
Site Deployed
,PDF generated
,Backup Completed
. - More on https://segment.com/academy/collecting-data/naming-conventions-for-clean-data/.
Running tests
You need to have pipenv and Python 3.7 installed on your machine. Then you can run:
$ make tests
Related packages
These packages are in the same problem-space:
- old release of pyramid_mixpanel by @hadrien had some neat ideas that this project built upon, even though it is a complete rewrite;
- the official mixpanel-python is a lower-level library that this project depends on;
- mostly deprecated Mixpanel-api for querying data, superseded by JQL;
- mixpanel-jql provides a Pythonic interface to writing JQL queries.
Use in the wild
A couple of projects that use pyramid_mixpanel in production:
- WooCart - Managed WooCommerce service.
- EasyBlogNetworks - PBN hosting and autopilot maintenance.
- Kafkai - AI generated content.
Changelog
0.13.0 (2024-03-08)
- MixpanelQuery.profile_by_email raises a custom exception called
MultipleProfilesFoundException
when multiple profiles are found for a given email. The exception contains the email and all profiles found so that clients can handle the exception as needed. [karantan]
0.12.0 (2022-03-22)
- Overhauled testing support for more readable asserts. This is a breaking change for existing test cases. [zupo]
0.11.0 (2022-02-10)
- Support for skipping arbitrary track/profile_set calls to Customer.io. [zupo]
0.10.2 (2021-12-13)
- Customer.io expects the main "sign up" timestamp to be sent as
created_at
. [zupo]
0.10.1 (2021-12-13)
- Fix another brownbag release by re-applying fixes from 0.9.1. [zupo]
0.10.0 (2021-12-13)
- Support different date formatting between Mixpanel and Customer.io. [zupo]
0.9.1 (2021-09-24)
- Fix brownbag release by fixing definition of extras. [zupo]
0.9.0 (2021-09-24)
- Add optional support for Customer.io. [zupo]
0.8.0 (2020-05-11)
-
Make structlog optional. [am-on]
-
Support setting event props from HTTP headers. [am-on]
0.7.0 (2019-12-19)
-
Added support for
people_union()
. [am-on] -
Added
sayanarijit/typecov
. [sayanarijit]
0.6.0 (2019-08-26)
- Added support for configuring a custom Consumer. [zupo]
0.5.0 (2019-08-25)
- Require that all Consumers implement a
flush()
method. [zupo]
0.4.3 (2019-08-24)
- Include py.typed in the package, third time is the charm? [zupo]
0.4.2 (2019-08-24)
- Include py.typed in the package, now for real. [zupo]
0.4.1 (2019-08-24)
- Include py.typed in the package. [zupo]
0.4.0 (2019-08-19)
-
Prepare for PYPI release of the rewrite. [zupo]
-
Small performance optimization. [zupo]
0.3.0 (2019-08-09)
-
Add guards that make sure parameters sent to MixpanelTrack are valid. [zupo]
-
Don't flood logs with "mixpanel configured" messages. [zupo]
-
Support for the
people_append
method. [suryasr007] -
Lots of cleanup of legacy assumptions:
profile_sync
method was removed- request.user no longer required
- MixpanelTrack init now accepts
distinct_id
instead ofuser
state
ProfileProperty no longer required [zupo]
0.2.1 (2019-07-28)
- Not all consumers have a .flush() method. [zupo]
0.2.0 (2019-07-27)
- Rewrite based on 5 years of Mixpanel usage in production at Niteo. [@zupo, @vanclevstik, @dz0ny, @karantan, @am-on, @rokcarl]
0.1.14 - 0.1.65 (2012-2014)
- Legacy version developed by @hadrien.
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