chronos-project/chronos-tracker

An automated tracker system for the Chronos framework

Overview

Chronos is an event-capturing framework for greenfield applications and is built with NodeJS, Apache Kafka, TimescaleDB, and PipelineDB. This repository contians the tracker file which captures events on the client side and sends them to the data pipeline. You can read about our story of creating Chronos here.

Installation

To build the tracker file you must have NodeJS and npm installed on your machine. Inside the root directory of the repository there is a config.json file. The properties are as follows:

Property	Value Type	Description
queueSize	Number (Integer)	Determines the maximum number of events that the buffer holds
errorHandling	Boolean	Detemines whether or not to handle errors on the client side. Will use the BeaconAPI if false, FetchAPI if true
linkClicks	Boolean	Determines whether or not to capture link click events
clicks	Boolean	Determines whether or not to capture mouse click events
pageviews	Boolean	Determines whether or not to capture pageview events
mousemoves	Boolean	Determines whether or not to capture mouse movement events
formSubmits	Boolean	Determines whether or not to capture form submission events
keypress	Boolean	Determines whether or not to capture key press events

We recommend using the defaults. Once the config.json file is set, go to the queue.js file in the src directory. On line 3, you must change the API_URL variable so that it points to your API server. Further, on line 26, make sure the value of the ACCESS_KEY property matches that on your API server as well.

Once this is done, from the root directory first install the dependencies and then run npm run build. The compiled tracker.js file will be in the javascripts directory. At this point just import the file into any pages that you need to track data, and events will automatically be captured and sent to the server!

The Team

Nick Calibey Software Engineer Tulsa, OK

Sasha Prodan Software Engineer San Francisco, CA