Add support for installation via Bower

Just had a question about trying to load snowplow through Bower, in which case the sp.js file would be bundled with the application as an installed dependency.

To implement this, I did the following

1. Removed .gitignore from the dist folder in my fork of snowplow-tracker-javascript
2. Ran grunt
3. Committed the generated files
4. Added this fork as a dependency in bower.json of my application

Essentially, in this case, the build would handle injecting sp.js into a script tag (before any application scripts) in index.html.

This would mean not having to include that part of the setup snippet that creates the script tag and sets the src, essentially now I would only need / want

 (function (p, l, o, w, i) {
      if (!p[i]) {
        p.GlobalSnowplowNamespace = p.GlobalSnowplowNamespace || [];
        p.GlobalSnowplowNamespace.push(i);

        p[i] = function () {
          (p[i].q = p[i].q || []).push(arguments);
        };

        p[i].q = p[i].q || [];
      }
    }(window, document, null, null, 'snowplow'));

When trying this, I no longer see snowplow analytic traffic in Chrome network tab.

Is this possible? Eventually, I would like my build to handle uploading files to S3 / Cloudfront, either as individual files or conact / min file, and this would reduce the coupling between this init script (since it requires specifying a path), and how snowplow gets loaded into my application. We also want to be able to version our fork as we will be modifying it as need to support additional tracking metrics over time, which again help with not having to specify a path in the setup snippet.

Any thoughts / feedback appreciated.

[alexanderdean]

Hi Owen - it's an interesting idea. We haven't done anything with Bower - but if Bower can handle async libraries, then I can't see why it wouldn't work...

Hi @alexanderdean, thanks for the reply!

I guess the emphasis is less on Bower per se, but rather including sp.js in a script tag in an a HTML file rather than explicitly through the "setup" snippet that expects a path to the location of sp.js to be passed into the IIFE, eg.

}(window, document, 'script', '//d111111abcdef8.cloudfront.net/sp.js', 'snowplow'));

Bower just happens to be the tool by which I have chosen to specify that snowplow should be "downloaded" locally so that my application can do something with it.

From there it's up to me how I manage that file so that it can be included via a script tag, using a tool like wiredep, which would add something like this to my index.html
<script src="/bower_components/snowplow/dist/sp.js"></script>

I could have just as easily copy / pasted the source into a file in my project without bower.

Is there something specific to the "setup" snippet (which dynamically creates the script tag and appends it to the last script tag) that might cause it not execute analytic events? Maybe something to do with asynchronous loading?

[mpolichette]

NPM support would be awesome also! :)

[mcouzinet]

Support for NPM and Bower would be cool.
We just need a compile version of the lib.

remove .gitignore inside build dir ?

[alexanderdean]

Okay, this one seems to be a popular one, scheduling.

Can commenters on this ticket give a more precise explanation of their use case? Loading analytics libraries in an async fashion from CDNs (as we do today) is pretty much the gold standard these days - clearly from this ticket, commenters have another use case in mind - what is it?

[mcouzinet]

For me it's a Cordova project.
We embed the tracker.

My use case (I'm the OP) is that we manage dependencies through bower.json as part of our build process, and this includes a fork of this project with some custom tweaks to support our application's needs. Being able to use a Gulp plugin tool like wiredep to automatically template these script files for us is very convenient. As far as CDN hosting, we use S3 / CloudFront, so that covers us there.

So I am looking to use <script> instead of the "init" snippet as posted in my opening comment.

[mpolichette]

My use case is to include the javascript tracker on our app which our customers embed on their own sites. We want to log to our own analytics and we don't want to interfere with any of their sites. Being able to include the tracker via npm import would allow us to bundle and not interact with the global scope.

[alexanderdean]

Makes sense @mpolichette , @obuckley-kenzan , @mcouzinet , thanks for sharing!