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pythondjangodeploymentgoogle-analytics
Daniel Watkins
Daniel Watkins

Reputation: 1686

Deploying Google Analytics With Django

We're about to deploy a new Django website, and we want to use Google Analytics to keep track of traffic on the site. However, we don't want all of the hits on development instances to contribute to the Google Analytics statistics.

There are a few ways we could deal with this:

The first option seems the most sensible, but I'm not sure if it is. For example, would we have to start passing a google_analytics variable into all of our views?

What are your thoughts?

Upvotes: 39

Views: 21979

Answers (10)

Luca Giovenzana
Luca Giovenzana

Reputation: 19

Hi all it's a quite old post.. But since I spent some time in searching some reusable app that is still actively maintained I want to share what I found:

https://github.com/jcassee/django-analytical

This project is still actively maintained and does not require the ID to be added to the database (I think is better if you have one project per site) so it is bared in the code no matter if the environment is development or production.

Upvotes: 1

Mark Chackerian
Mark Chackerian

Reputation: 23582

All of these other solutions may work, but they are all overkill now because you can easily set up a filter in Google Analytics to filter out all traffic that is not coming from your production website or websites. See Create/Manage Profile Filters in the GA Help. A solution with no code just makes everybody's life easier.

Note: there are two caveats

  1. this doesn't work with realtime filtering, because no filters are applied to realtime (as of July 2012--check their documents)
  2. you have to be an admin with the Google Analytics account to set this up

Upvotes: 5

Chien-Wei Huang
Chien-Wei Huang

Reputation: 1851

Another simple way. In settings.py，Check debug is True, then add:

INTERNAL_IPS = (
    '127.0.0.1',
    'localhost',
)

Then you can use things in your template like this:

{% if not debug %}
<script> blah blah </script>
{% endif %}

If want to change to production, set debug to False.

Ref: http://www.djangobook.com/en/2.0/chapter09.html

Upvotes: 4

Ryan Walton
Ryan Walton

Reputation: 1127

Here's the dead simple way that I solved it:

Create an app in your project called 'utils' if you haven't already. See these directions.

However, follow this approach to include all global context processers in addition to the project settings. It's seems to be a better practice. Here are the instructions.

So, after you create your 'utils' app, create a a file called context_processors.py in /utils that looks like this:

from django.conf import settings

def googleanalytics(request):
    return {
        'google_tracking_id' : settings.GOOGLE_TRACKING_ID,
    }

In you settings.py file, add this:

import django.conf.global_settings as DEFAULT_SETTINGS

TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS = DEFAULT_SETTINGS.TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS + (
     'utils.context_processors.googleanalytics',

)

Hope this helps!

Upvotes: 0

mikl
mikl

Reputation: 24307

A little late to the party, but there's a reusable Django app called django-google-analytics. The easiest way to use it is:

  1. Add the google_analytics application to your INSTALLED_APPS section of your settings.py.
  2. In your base template, usually a base.html, insert this tag at the very top: {% load analytics %}
  3. In the same template, insert the following code right before the closing body tag: {% analytics "UA-xxxxxx-x" %} the UA-xxxxxx-x is a unique Google Analytics code for your domain.

Upvotes: 15

worksology
worksology

Reputation: 885

My solution takes a similar approach to Ned's preferred answer, but separates the analytics code into its own template. I prefer this, so I can just copy the template from project to project.

Here's a snippet from my context_processor file:

from django.conf import settings
from django.template.loader import render_to_string

def analytics(request):
    """
    Returns analytics code.
    """
    if not settings.DEBUG:
        return { 'analytics_code': render_to_string("analytics/analytics.html", { 'google_analytics_key: settings.GOOGLE_ANALYTICS_KEY }) }
    else:
        return { 'analytics_code': "" }

Of course you'll need to tell Django to include this in your context. In in your settings.py file, include:

TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS = (
    ...
    "context_processors.analytics",
)

I have it set up to include the analytics code only when DEBUG is set to False, but you may prefer to key it off something else, perhaps a new setting altogether. I think DEBUG is a good default since it supposes you don't want to track any hits while debugging/developing.

Create a setting with your Google Analytics Key:

GOOGLE_ANALYTICS_KEY = "UA-1234567-8"

Create a template called: "analytics/analytics.html" that includes something like this:

<script type="text/javascript">
var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
try {
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("{{ google_analytics_key }}");
pageTracker._trackPageview();
} catch(err) {}</script>

Finally, just before the closing tag in your base.html template, add this:

{{ analytics_code }}

Now your analytics code will be included only when DEBUG=False. Otherwise, nothing will be included.

Upvotes: 9

lacker
lacker

Reputation: 5550

Instead of including the script tag directly in your html, just change the analytics javascript so it only runs if the href does not contain your prod site's name. This will work without any extra configuration.

Upvotes: 2

Andrew Wilkinson
Andrew Wilkinson

Reputation: 10846

I mostly agree with Ned, although I have a single setting called IS_LIVE_SITE which toggles analytics code, adverts and a few other things. This way I can keep all the keys in subversion (as it is a pain to look them up) and still toggle them on or off easily.

Upvotes: 2

S.Lott
S.Lott

Reputation: 391952

You have template context processors that can be used to pass values to all templates without updating all your views.

http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/settings/#template-context-processors

Upvotes: 1

Ned Batchelder
Ned Batchelder

Reputation: 375744

First, create a way to have your development and production servers pull settings from different files, say dev.py and prod.py. There are lots of ways to do this.

Then, create a setting, GOOGLE_ANALYTICS_KEY. In dev.py set it to the empty string. In prod.py, set it to your key, something like "UA-124465-1". Create a context processor to add this setting to all your template contexts, either as GOOGLE_ANALYTICS_KEY, or just go ahead and add your settings module. Then, in your template, use it to conditionally include your analytics code:

{% if settings.GOOGLE_ANALYTICS_KEY %}
<script> blah blah {{settings.GOOGLE_ANALYTICS_KEY}} blah blah </script>
{% endif %}

Upvotes: 54

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