Write key mandatory needed?

[sluceno]

Hello

I am wondering why the write_key is mandatory for segment.

We are forced to set a key in development / testing / staging / pre_production while we are not going to push any metric whatsoever.

From my opinion the gem will be more usable without enforcing the write_key, we have for example the stub attribute which is really helpfull for those environments which we don't want to deactivate the tracking.

The Gem could run automagically in stub mode if no write_key is set.

There is probably a good reason to have it mandatory, please enlighten me if that's the case, I've been browsing in the Issues and could not find any related, so probably it's a misunderstanding from my side

Thanks! Keep up with the good work!

[rohitpaulk]

@sluceno Thanks for the report! I agree that checking for write_key doesn't make sense when stub mode is on.

Two options we've got here:

• Automatically run in stub mode if write_key isn't set
• Only check write_key if stub mode is off

The latter is a non-breaking change and will force explicit usage of stub mode, so I'll go with that.

[f2prateek]

It doesn't seem that hard for clients to set a writeKey when using it in stub mode. You can even set it to something like test. Is this really needed?

[jhirn]

This makes for a frustrating but initial setup. It's not that hard to solve but it's not Rail'y.

SegmentAnalytics = Segment::Analytics.new({
    write_key: ENV['SEGMENT_API_KEY'] || "disabled",
    test: Rails.env.test?,
    stub: ENV['SEGMENT_API_KEY'] || Rails.env.development?,
    batch_size: 100,
    on_error: Proc.new do |status, msg|
      print status, msg
    end
})