Overview

This aptly-named module is a way to do scalable logging to mixpanel. It makes use of the beanstalkc library (install handled by setuptools if you don't have it) and requires a running beanstalkd server. The work flow is quite simple: Use this module's client in your code to queue API requests. The module's server will retrieve queued items and act on them. Simple.

Why So Complicated?

Admittedly, this simple module comes with a lot of dependencies. Since it is built with scalability and asynchrony in mind, it doesn't immediately send your requests to mixpanel. Instead, it queues them to a beanstalkd server, a very fast and efficient in-memory queue. The daemon script issues requests at its leisure.

Installation (short)

If you have none of the above prerequisites and wish to run beanstalkd on the same server as mixpaneld and log from there, this is the fastest installation and setup possible. At console, execute:

sudo easy_install mixpanel
# For CentOS / RHEL, you need epel-release
sudo rpm -Uvh http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/i386/epel-release-5-3.noarch.rpm
sudo yum install beanstalkd
beanstalkd -d
mixpaneld -d

You are now up and running; you may skip down to "Usage".

Installation (long)

Step 1:

easy_install mixpanel

or...

git clone git://github.com/tdavis/mixpanel.git
cd mixpanel
python setup.py install

Step 2:

You will need to run the mixpaneld script found at scripts/mixpaneld; the script should already be in your PATH if you used setup.py (run which mixpaneld to find out). Note that you may move it wherever you like. The daemon takes optional parameters which you should view before running it by using the command mixpaneld --help.

You will also need to have a running beanstalkd server. Installing and setting up the server is quite trivial and is left as an exercise to the reader; see the beanstalkd download page. Note that you do not need a client library; that is taken care of by this package.

Usage

To queue a log call:

from mixpanel import MixpanelLogger
# Your mixpanel project code
pcode = '7fdec37db628e57465b98e235338049d'
# Beanstalk connection info
host = 'localhost'
port = 11311
logger = MixpanelLogger(pcode, host, port)
logger.log(
	category = 'my_category',
	action = 'my_action',
	# type, setting, distinct_value, etc.
)

You may also set the following environment variables:

• MIXPANEL_PROJECT_CODE: Your project code
• MIXPANEL_BEANSTALKD_HOST: Default beanstalkd host
• MIXPANEL_BEANSTALKD_PORT: Default beanstalkd port

The latter two have defaults, which happen to the be same defaults that beanstalkd uses if you do not specify them when running the server. For this reason, you can do what we saw above in Installation (short) to get things running:

beanstalkd -d
mixpaneld -d

Then, in code:

logger = MixpanelLogger(pcode)

And you're ready for logging in 3 lines without having to specify any host or port information! The only downside is, this setup won't work cross-network. For that, you'd need to specify LAN hosts when starting / connecting to the daemons.

For a list of all possible keyword arguments to the mixpanel API, see the mixpanel API docs.