Useful:Visitor

Simple user tracking baked into your app so you can control and manipulate the data.

Example:

Server server/lib/visitor.js

Visitor.init();

Client client/lib/visitor.js

Visitor.init({
	subscribe: true
});

Adds the packages useful:visitor-client and useful:visitor-server to your app automatically.

Installation

meteor add useful:visitor

What you can do

on the server

Visitor.init(options)

You must call init on the server to support anonymous user tracking.

The reason is that you have a choice of where to store the anonymous data.

options {} (all properties and the entire argument is optional)

{
	collection: your choice to name the collection
}

on the client

Visitor.init(options)

You must call init on the client to begin anonymous user tracking.

The reason is that you have a choice of where to store the anonymous data in case you want to offload this functionality to another server.

options {} (all properties and the entire argument is optional)

{
	collection: your choice to name the collection
	, connection: your choice of DDP connection to use
	, localStorageKey: your choice of what key to use to store the anonymous id in local storage
	, subscribe: true/false if you want to automatically subscribe to the current visitor's document (default **false**)
}

Visitor.id() and Meteor.visitorId()

Reactively returns the randomly generated id of the current anonymous visitor (still exists when user is logged in).

Visitor.current() and Meteor.visitor()

Reactively returns the document of the current anonymous visitor (still exists when user is logged in).

Properties that may be available on the document by default are:

{
	"_id" : "zfPeaxykvcuSSSu6f",
	"visitorId" : "2Jqa6GmSTXFWkoWX7",
	"userId" : "yQyrEySmi8mS8xgtH",
	"createdAt" : ISODate("2015-04-27T02:59:19.088Z"),
	"startPage" : "http://localhost:3000/proposal/N6gJbEvJm2dyGfMQm/send",
	"lastSeen" : ISODate("2015-04-27T03:01:12.235Z"),
	"lastSeenOnPage" : "http://localhost:3000/"
}

Why you should care

You built an app, and people are using it, nice work hot shot!

But what are your users doing?

That's really important but not always obvious. And if you're going to start tracking that yourself (because you like your data) you need a way to identify anonymous visitors.

Now you can automatically collect basic information about visitors to your app (logged in or not) and actually work with that data directly in your code, hooray!