Capturing events

You can send custom events using capture:

posthog.capture('user_signed_up');

Tip: We recommend using a [object] [verb] format for your event names, where [object] is the entity that the behavior relates to, and [verb] is the behavior itself. For example, project created, user signed up, or invite sent.

Setting event properties

Optionally, you can also include additional information in the event by setting the properties value:

posthog.capture('user_signed_up', {
    login_type: "email",
    is_free_trial: true
})

Page views and autocapture

By default, PostHog automatically captures the following frontend events:

• Pageviews, including the URL.
• Autocaptured events, such as any click, change of input, or submission associated with a, button, form, input, select, textarea, and label tags.

If you prefer to disable these, set the appropriate values in your configuration options.

Single-page apps and pageviews

PostHog automatically sends pageview events whenever it gets loaded. If you have a single-page app, that means it only sends a pageview once (when your app loads).

To make sure any navigating a user does within your app gets captured, you can make a pageview call manually.

posthog.capture('$pageview')

This automatically sends the current URL along with other relevant properties.

PostHog captures identified events by default. To change this and capture anonymous events, change the person_profiles config when initializing PostHog:

1. person_profiles: 'always' (default) - Capture identified events for all events.

2. person_profiles: 'identified_only' (recommended) - Anonymous events are captured by default. PostHog only captures identified events for users where person profiles have already been created.

For example:

posthog.init(
    '<ph_project_api_key>',
    {
        api_host: 'https://us.i.posthog.com',
        person_profiles: 'identified_only'
    }
)

Identified events are captured by default if you've set the person_profiles config to always (the default option).

If you've set the person_profiles to identified_only, anonymous events are captured by default. Then, to capture identified events, call any of the following functions:

• identify()
• alias()
• group()
• setPersonProperties()
• setPersonPropertiesForFlags()
• setGroupPropertiesForFlags()

When you call any of these functions, it creates a person profile for the user. Once this profile is created, all subsequent events for this user will be captured as identified events.