Keen IO Official Ruby Client Library

keen-gem is the official Ruby Client for the Keen IO API. The Keen IO API lets developers build analytics features directly into their apps.

Installation

Add to your Gemfile:

gem 'keen'

or install from Rubygems:

gem install keen

keen is tested with Ruby 1.8 and 1.9 on:

• MRI
• Rubinius
• jRuby (except for asynchronous methods - no TLS support for EM on jRuby)

Usage

Before making any API calls, you must supply keen-gem with a Project ID and one or both of your Write and Read Keys. (If you need a Keen IO account, sign up here - it's free.) The Write key is required for publishing events, and the Read key is required for running queries.

The recommended way to do this is to set KEEN_PROJECT_ID, KEEN_WRITE_KEY, and KEEN_READ_KEY in your environment. If you're using foreman, add this to your .env file:

KEEN_PROJECT_ID=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx KEEN_WRITE_KEY=yyyyyyyyyyyyy KEEN_READ_KEY=zzzzzzzzzzzzz

If not, make to to export the variable into your shell or put it before the command you use to start your server.

When you deploy, make sure your production environment variables are set. For example, set config vars on Heroku. (We recommend this environment-based approach because it keeps sensitive information out of the codebase. If you can't do this, see the alternatives below.)

If your environment is set up property, Keen is ready to go immediately. Publish an event like this:

Keen.publish("sign_ups", { :username => "lloyd", :referred_by => "harry" })

This will publish an event to the 'sign_ups' collection with the username and referred_by properties set.

The event properties are arbitrary JSON, and the event collection need not exist in advance. If it doesn't exist, Keen IO will create it on the first request.

You can learn more about data modeling with Keen IO with the Data Modeling Guide.

Asynchronous publishing

Publishing events shouldn't slow your application down. It shouldn't make your users wait longer for their request to finish.

The Keen IO API is fast, but any synchronous network call you make will negatively impact response times. For this reason, we recommend you use the publish_async method to send events.

To compare asychronous vs. synchronous performance, check out the keen-gem-example app.

To publish asynchronously, first add em-http-request to your Gemfile. Make sure it's version 1.0 or above.

gem "em-http-request", "~> 1.0"

Next, run an instance of EventMachine. If you're using an EventMachine-based web server like thin or goliath you're already doing this. Otherwise, you'll need to start an EventMachine loop manually as follows:

Thread.new { EventMachine.run }

The best place for this is in an initializer, or anywhere that runs when your app boots up. Here's a good blog article that explains more about this approach - EventMachine and Passenger.

And here's a gist that shows an example of Eventmachine with Unicorn. Thanks to jonkgrimes for sharing this with us!

Now, in your code, replace publish with publish_async. Bind callbacks if you require them.

http = Keen.publish_async("sign_ups", { :username => "lloyd", :referred_by => "harry" })
http.callback { |response| puts "Success: #{response}"}
http.errback { puts "was a failurrr :,(" }

This will schedule the network call into the event loop and allow your request thread to resume processing immediately.

Running queries

The Keen IO API provides rich querying capabilities against your event data set. For more information, see the Data Analysis API Guide.

Queries require that a Read Key is provided. Just like project ID, we encourage that you set this as an environment variable:

KEEN_READ_KEY=yyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy

Here's are some examples of querying with keen-gem. Let's assume you've added some events to the "purchases" collection.

Keen.count("purchases") # => 100
Keen.sum("purchases", :target_property => "price")  # => 10000
Keen.minimum("purchases", :target_property => "price")  # => 20
Keen.maximum("purchases", :target_property => "price")  # => 100
Keen.average("purchases", :target_property => "price")  # => 60

Keen.sum("purchases", :target_property => "price", :group_by => "item.id")  # => [{ "item.id": 123, "result": 240 }, { ... }]

Keen.count_unique("purchases", :target_property => "username")  # => 3
Keen.select_unique("purchases", :target_property => "username")  # => ["bob", "linda", "travis"]

Keen.extraction("purchases")  # => [{ "price" => 20, ... }, { ... }]

Keen.funnel(:steps => [
  { :actor_property => "username", :event_collection => "purchases" },
  { :actor_property => "username", :event_collection => "referrals" },
  { ... }])  # => [20, 15 ...]

Keen.multi_analysis("purchases", analyses: {
  :gross =>      { :analysis_type => "sum", :target_property => "price" },
  :customers =>  { :analysis_type => "count_unique", :target_property => "username" } },
  :timeframe => 'today', :group_by => "item.id") # => [{"item.id"=>2, "gross"=>314.49, "customers"=> 8}, { ... }]

Many of there queries can be performed with group by, filters, series and intervals. The API response for these is converted directly into Ruby Hash or Array.

Detailed information on available parameters for each API resource can be found on the API Technical Reference.

Other code examples

Authentication

To configure keen-gem in code, do as follows:

Keen.project_id = 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx'
Keen.write_key = 'yyyyyyyyyyyyyyy'
Keen.read_key = 'zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz'

You can also configure individual client instances as follows:

keen = Keen::Client.new(:project_id => 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx',
                        :write_key  => 'yyyyyyyyyyyyyyy',
                        :read_key   => 'zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz')

em-synchrony

keen-gem can be used with em-synchrony. If you call publish_async and EM::Synchrony is defined the method will return the response directly. (It does not return the deferrable on which to register callbacks.) Likewise, it will raise exceptions 'synchronously' should they happen.

Beacon URL's

It's possible to publish events to your Keen IO project using the HTTP GET method. This is useful for situations like tracking email opens using image beacons.

In this situation, the JSON event data is passed by encoding it base-64 and adding it as a request parameter called data. The beacon_url method found on the Keen::Client does this for you. Here's an example:

Keen.project_id = 'xxxxxx';
Keen.write_key = 'yyyyyy';
Keen.beacon_url("sign_ups", :recipient => "foo@foo.com")
  # => "https://api.keen.io/3.0/projects/xxxxxx/events/email_opens?api_key=yyyyyy&data=eyJyZWNpcGllbnQiOiJmb29AZm9vLmNvbSJ9"

To track email opens, simply add an image to your email template that points to this URL.

Changelog

0.7.1

• Allow configuration of the base API URL via the KEEN_API_URL environment variable. Useful for local testing and proxies.

0.7.0

• BREAKING CHANGE! Added support for read and write scoped keys to reflect the new Keen IO security architecture. The advantage of scoped keys is finer grained permission control. Public clients that publish events (like a web browser) require a key that can write but not read. On the other hand, private dashboards and server-side querying processes require a Read key that should not be made public.

0.6.1

• Improved logging and exception handling.

0.6.0

• Added querying capabilities. A big thanks to ifeelgoods for contributing!

0.5.0

• Removed API Key as a required field on Keen::Client. Only the Project ID is required to publish events.
• You can continue to provide the API Key. Future features planned for this gem will require it. But for now, there is no keen-gem functionality that uses it.

0.4.4

• Event collections are URI escaped to account for spaces.
• User agent of API calls made more granular to aid in support cases.
• Throw arguments error for nil event_collection and properties arguments.

0.4.3

• Added beacon_url support
• Add support for using em-synchrony with asynchronous calls

Questions & Support

If you have any questions, bugs, or suggestions, please report them via Github Issues. Or, come chat with us anytime at users.keen.io. We'd love to hear your feedback and ideas!

Contributing

keen-gem is an open source project and we welcome your contributions. Fire away with issues and pull requests!

Community Contributors

• alexkwolfe
• peteygao
• obieq

Thanks everyone, you rock!