Capturing events

By default, PostHog automatically captures pageviews and pageleaves as well as clicks, change of inputs, and form submissions associated with a, button, form, input, select, textarea, and label tags. See our autocapture docs for more details on this.

If you prefer to disable or filter these, set the appropriate values in your configuration options.

Custom event capture

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 include additional information with the event by including a properties object:

posthog.capture('user_signed_up', {
    login_type: "email",
    is_free_trial: true
})

Manually capturing pageviews and pageleaves in single-page apps

PostHog automatically captures $pageview events on page load and $pageleave events on page unload. If you have a single-page app, that means it only sends pageview and pageleave once (when your app loads and when users leave).

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

// 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. See our guide to tracking pageviews in single-page apps for more details.

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. 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.