Open Source - PostHog a product management tool

2021-06-20

This week, I read an article on dev.to about some excellent OpenSource tools. Being a bit partial to free candy, I decided to check them out. Where I am working right now, a lot of the tooling and UI seems to be internal. We have a new product owner, who I asked if they had used PostHog before, as well as asking in a UX chat-group I have been a part of for some years.

Getting Started

I Had written a note, which was something simple like "look at posthog". I knew it had mentioned analytics and feature flags, which are two areas I am quite passionate about. Duck Duck Go was my friend here.

They are clearly going the Open-Source with commercial backing route, which made finding the instructions less straightforward than smaller projects, which generally have everything a few clicks away. I Clicked "get started", then on the left-hand side used the "Open Source" link where they were attempting to funnel me to the SaaS version. If you like SaaS, or are less technically minded, this might be a better option for you.

From the OpenSource page, you are dropped into the docs, where I feel quite at home. They have a one-click deploy to Heroku, which I love. And also documentation for a lot of different platforms. I wanted to try this locally, as I feel I need to know more before deploying anything to the internet. I have a lovely 128GB RAM server I can throw things onto and forget about, with a slither of the AWS bill. It's local, but I love it.

Slightly less clear than I would like

The instructions for docker suggest that I need to git clone the posthog repository. This was unfortunate, as I really did not want to look at the source code yet. If it were not enjoyable, reasonably turn-key, I might have glanced and never touched it again.

I had been playing with some other software, which also used Docker and docker-compose to deploy and aside from some confusion around the necessity of their CLI; it was a lot easier to configure and play with.

Eventually I tested the following setup, which I prefer. It's a single file, not a repo. Does not care about GitHub, or git, or archives. Just one text file, and an internet connection.

docker-compose.yml

services:
    db:
        container_name: posthog_db
        environment:
            POSTGRES_DB: posthog
            POSTGRES_PASSWORD: posthog
            POSTGRES_USER: posthog
        image: postgres:13-alpine
        volumes:
            - postgres-data:/var/lib/postgresql/data
    redis:
        container_name: posthog_redis
        image: redis:6-alpine
    web:
        container_name: posthog_web
        depends_on:
            - db
            - redis
        environment:
            DATABASE_URL: postgres://posthog:posthog@db:5432/posthog
            REDIS_URL: redis://redis:6379/
            SECRET_KEY: fwkh34tr7rfihskjhf47fyworshfs
            DEBUG: 'true'
            SITE_URL: http://192.168.99.102:8000
            JS_URL: http://192.168.99.102:8234
            DISABLE_SECURE_SSL_REDIRECT: 'true'
            ALLOWED_HOSTS: '*'
        image: posthog/posthog:latest
        links:
            - db:db
            - redis:redis
        ports:
            - 8000:8000
            - 80:8000
volumes:
    postgres-data:
version: '3'

Some notes on this

This is for running on my local windows machine.
http://192.168.99.102 is the docker-machine address. Yours will likely be http://127.0.0.1/ or http://localhost
This is pulling the latest edge build. That might lead to stability issues if you try.
I just mashed some keys to get the secret key
Because I am running locally, I provided the following options
- DEBUG - set to true, so I could see what I screw up.
- SITE_URL - I wanted to be sure.
- JS_URL - I wanted to be sure.
- DISABLE_SECURE_SSL_REDIRECT - Not setting this seemed to be pain.
- ALLOWED_HOSTS - by the time I got here, I just wanted to be sure.

All I had to type after this was docker-compose up -d and a few minutes later, I had a working install.

Things I like

Visually appealing to me.
Has keyboard shortcuts, and surfaces them in non-annoying way.
Session recording was an option.
Support for multiple projects.
Support for plugins, with clear documentation on authoring.
Setting up Integration came with code examples.
Slack Community.
Powerful feature flagging.

Things I would change

I Had to turn on session recording.
The session recording close button sometimes breaks, needing a refresh.
Because of the GitHub advice, I first used docker-compose.dev.yml... On windows.
I Think their docker-compose should be distributed standalone.
I Think their tagging strategy of latest and latest-release should be latest and latest-edge / nightly.
Feature flagging is on/off, which is fine, but also involves more dev work.
The API seemed to be missing an endpoint, to get all features or experiments for a user.
The API seemed to be missing an endpoint, to post a batch of events / activities.
No obvious way to Opt users out of experiments.

Conclusion

If you have never used PostHog, try it out. I would rate it 4.5 out of 5 stars, and mostly because of non-OpenSource tooling I have built and worked with in the past. Do not build your own. Go buy something, and strongly-consider PostHog, as it respects your freedoms.

By Lewis Cowles