Configuring the Playground

Vanity will work out of the box on a default configuration. Assuming you’re using Redis on localhost, post 6379, there’s nothing special to do.

Database connection information is loaded from config/vanity.yml, based on the current environment (RACK_ENV or RAILS_ENV). Example:

development:
  adapter: redis
  connection: redis://localhost:6379/0
test:
  collecting: false
production:
  adapter: mongodb
  database: analytics

If there’s no configuration file and the application does not create a connection explicitly, Vanity will default to the Redis instance running on localhost at port 6379.

The available database adapters are:

redis — This adapter is used by default. Available options are connection and password. host, port, database (defaults to 0) options are available, but deprecated.
mongodb — Available options are host, port, database (defaults to “vanity”), username and password.
active_record — Uses existing ActiveRecord configuration, by you can over-ride by supplying different options. To pick different underlying adapter, set active_record_adapter.

Configuration Options

Available configuration options are:

name	Is all about …	Default
add_participant_route	URL to use to add participants via JS	/vanity/add_participant
collecting	False if you won’t want data collected	true
config_file	File name to use to configure vanity	vanity.yml
config_path	Path to the config_file	./config/
environment	What environment use for configuration	development
experiments_path	Directory containing experiment files	./experiments
failover_on_datastore_error	Whether to pass errors to on_datastore_error	false
locales_path	Path to locales for translations	in the gem
logger	This should be obvious	default/Rails
on_datastore_error	A proc that handles datastore errors	logs to logger
request_filter	A proc that returns whether to to ignore the request for the add JS participant route	Ignore requests with a HTTP_USER_AGENT that contain a URL
templates_path	Path to templates for Vanity admin	the templates in the gem
use_js	Whether to use JS to add particpants, useful to ignore bots	false
experiments_start_enabled	Whether new experiments start in the enabled or disabled state	true
cookie_name	The name of the anonymous tracking cookie	`vanity_id`
cookie_expires	The duration of the cookie	20 years
cookie_domain	The domain for the cookie. Rails.application.config.session_options[:domain] will be substituted if `nil`.	`nil`
cookie_path	The path of the cookie	`nil`
cookie_secure	The secure (ssl-only) parameter of the cookie.	`false`
cookie_httponly	The httponly parameter of the cookie	`false`

When running under Rails, Vanity defaults to using the Rails logger, locates the load_path relative to Rails root, uses the config/vanity.yml configuration file (if present) and turns collection on only in production mode.

Use the playground object to configure Vanity. For example:

Vanity.configure do |config|
  config.use_js = true
  config.experiments_path = 'config/ab_tests'
  config.add_participant_route = '/vanity/participant/new'
  # ...
end

Using metrics from Google Analytics

If you want to use Vanity with metrics from Google Analytics, you must require the garb gem, and login for a new session. You’ll want to do that for production, not for development if you like developing offline. For example in Rails, in the config/:

config.after_initialize do
  require "garb"
  Garb::Session.login('..ga email..', '..ga pwd..', account_type: "GOOGLE")
end