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.

Manually capturing pageviews and pageleaves in single-page apps

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

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

// Capture pageview
posthog.capture('$pageview')

// Capture pageleave
posthog.capture('$pageleave')

This automatically sends the current URL along with other autocaptured properties like the referrer, OS, scroll depth, and more.

The JavaScript Web SDK captures anonymous events by default. However, this may change depending on your person_profiles config when initializing PostHog:

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

2. person_profiles: 'always' - Capture identified events for all events.

For example:

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

If you've set the personProfiles config to IDENTIFIED_ONLY (the default option), 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.

Alternatively, you can set personProfiles to ALWAYS to capture identified events by default.