Developing the website

You can contribute to the PostHog documentation, handbook, and blog in two ways:

You can create a pull request in GitHub for any page that has an Edit this page link on it. In this situation you must edit the page using the GitHub web editor interface. This method is suitable for text-only edits and basic file manipulation, such as renaming.
You can run the posthog.com website in development and make changes there by creating a branch of the master codebase, committing changes to that branch and raising a pull request to merge those changes. This is the recommended method as it allows you to quickly preview your changes, as well as perform more complex changes easily.

Below, we'll explain the two options for option two.

Option 1: Running with codespaces

Creating/running the codespace

Open the posthog.com repository in GitHub.
Click the Code button, then the Codespaces tab, then under the ... menu, choose New with options...
Under Machine type, choose 4-core.
When the repo opens in Codespaces, it will install some things automatically.
When completed, press any key.
In terminal, type yarn && yarn start and hit [Enter].
- This will take a while. The last step of the process is "Building development bundle" which will take a few minutes on its own.
- You may see a dialog that says, "Your application running on port 8001 is available." Don't be enticed by the big green button quite yet.
Once you see success Writing page-data.json files..., you can click the green Open in browser button which will open the site at http://localhost:8001.
You can also click the Ports tab to access the URL where you can preview the site. Cmd + click the URL seen here.

Committing and pushing changes

Use the built-in Git tab in VS Code to commit and push your changes.

From the Git source control ... menu, choose Checkout to... to create a new branch.
Type a new branch name and press enter.
Now you can commit changes to your new branch. Type a commit message and use Cmd + Enter (or push the big green button).
If you see the dialog below, choose Always to always stage all files you've changed. (Otherwise, you'll need to hit the + button next to each file you want to commit.)
Now that your changes are committed, it's time to publish them to GitHub.

Note: After finish changes on your branch, be sure to switch back to master so you don't inadvertently make future changes to your current branch.

Stopping the server

Place your cursor into Terminal and type Cmd+C to stop the server.
In the bottom left corner of the window, click Codspaces: [your codespace name], then Stop current codespace.

Notes

If you plan on using this codespace frequently, disable Auto-delete codespace in the ... menu under the Code > Codespaces dropdown in the repo.

Option 2: Editing posthog.com locally

Before you begin

In order to run the PostHog website locally, you need the following installed:

Git – version control system
Node.js – server runtime
Yarn (version 1.x) – package manager for Node.js
Apple Rosetta (version 2) – dynamic binary translator for Apple silicon

If you are unfamiliar with using Git from the command line (or just prefer graphical interfaces), use the GitHub Desktop app.

You may also want to familiarize yourself with these resources:

Cloning the posthog.com repository

The posthog.com codebase is on GitHub at https://github.com/PostHog/posthog.com. To work on it locally, first you need to clone it to your disk:

via the command line
You can clone the codebase from the command line using the following command:
Terminal
```
git clone git@github.com:PostHog/posthog.com.git
```
via GitHub Desktop
You can also clone the repository with GitHub Desktop installed, from the posthog.com repository page, click the Code button and select Open with GitHub Desktop from the dropdown that appears.

You will then be prompted by the browser to confirm if you want to open the GitHub Desktop application. Select the affirmative action that has text such as Open GitHub Desktop.
Once GitHub Desktop has opened you will be prompted to confirm the repository that is being cloned and the location on disk where you wish the code to be stored.

Click Clone to clone the posthog.com repository to your local disk.

Once the clone has completed the GitHub Desktop interface will change to the following:

To view the code for the website click Open in Visual Studio Code. Dialogs may appear around permissions and trust as you open Visual Studio Code.
Once you have Visual Studio Code open, select the Terminal menu option. Within the dropdown select New Terminal. This will open a new terminal window within Visual Studio Code:

Don't worry! We only need to run a few commands in the command line.

Running posthog.com locally

If you're using an Apple Silicon Mac (M1) then you'll need to run the following commands before using yarn:

Terminal

rm -rf ./node_modules
brew install vips

Type the following into the command line and press return:

Terminal

yarn

This runs the Yarn tool. When run standalone like this, it installs the dependency packages used by posthog.com. This may take a few minutes.

Once this command has finished executing, run the following:

Terminal

yarn start

This runs the local clone of the website, which you can use to preview changes you make before pushing them live. It takes a bit of time for some file processing and compilation to take place, but once it's completed you can access the locally running version of posthog.com via by visiting http://localhost:8001 in your web browser.

Any time you want to preview changes you are making to the local version of the website, all you have to do is run the yarn start again, wait for the command to finish running and then open http://localhost:8001 in your web browser.

Environment variables

Our website uses various APIs to pull in data from sites like GitHub (for contributors) and Ashby (our applicant tracking system). Without setting these environment variables, you may see various errors when building the site. Most of these errors are dismissible, and you can continue to edit the website.

If you're a core team member and need this data locally, you can:

Ask the Website & Docs team files located for access to our Vercel account
Install the Vercel CLI
Run vercel pull
Open .vercel/.env.development.local
Copy a value and run in your terminal like: export VARIABLE_NAME=VALUE

Finding the content to edit

Once you have cloned the repo, the contents/ directory contains a few key areas:

docs/ = all of the documentation for PostHog's platform
handbook/ = the PostHog company handbook
blog/ = our blog posts

Inside each of these are a series of markdown files for you to edit.

Making edits

Creating a new Git branch

When editing locally, changes should be made on a new Git branch. Branches should be given an "at a glance" informative name. For example, posthog-website-contribution.

via the command line You can create a new Git branch from the command line by running:
Terminal
```
git checkout -b [new-branch-name]
```
For example:
Terminal
```
git checkout -b posthog-website-contribution
```

via GitHub Desktop
You can also create a new branch in GitHub Desktop by selecting the dropdown next to the Current Branch name and clicking New Branch.

Then, in the dialog that follows, entering the new branch name.

Once you have a new branch, you can make changes.

Markdown details

Frontmatter

Most PostHog pages utilize frontmatter as a way of providing additional data to the page. Available frontmatter varies based on the template the page uses. Templates are determined based on the folder the file resides in:

Blog

Markdown files located in `/contents/blog``

markdown

---
date: 2021-11-16
title: The state of plugins on PostHog
rootPage: /blog
author: ["yakko-majuri"]
featuredVideo: https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/TCyCryTiTbQ
featuredImage: https://res.cloudinary.com/dmukukwp6/image/upload/posthog.com/contents/images/blog/running-content.png
featuredImageType: full
category: Guides
tags: ["Using PostHog", "Privacy"]
seo: {
    metaTitle: Overview of PostHog Plugins
    metaDescription: Learn about the current state of plugins on PostHog and get valuable insights into their functionality and performance.
}
---

date: the date the blog was posted
title: the title that appears at the top of the blog post and on the blog listing page
rootPage: necessary for listing all blog posts on /blog. should always be set to /blog
author: the author(s) of the post. correlates to your handle located in /src/data/authors.json
featuredVideo: the iframe src of the video that appears at the top of the post. replaces the featured image on post pages.
featuredImage: the Cloudinary URL of the image that appears at the top of the post and on the blog listing page
featuredImageType: standard | full - determines the width of the featured image on the blog post
category: the broader category the post belongs to. one of the following:
- - CEO diaries
  - Engineering
  - General
  - Inside PostHog
  - PostHog news
  - Product growth
  - Startups
  - Using PostHog
tags: the more specific tag(s) the post belongs to. an array containing any number of the following:
- - Alerts
  - CEO diaries
  - ClickHouse
  - Comparisons
  - Culture
  - Explainers
  - Feature flags
  - General
  - Growth
  - Guides
  - Inside PostHog
  - Launch week
  - Marketing
  - Offsites
  - Open source
  - PostHog news
  - Privacy
  - Product analytics
  - Product engineers
  - Product metrics
  - Product updates
  - Release notes
  - Startups
  - Y Combinator
seo: object containing SEO metadata:
- metaTitle: String
- metaDescription: String

Tutorials

Markdown files located in /contents/tutorials

markdown

---
date: 2022-02-14
title: How to filter out internal users
author: ["joe-martin"]
featuredTutorial: false
featuredVideo: https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/2bptTniYPGc
tags: ['filters', 'settings']
---

date: the date the tutorial was posted
title: the title that appears at the top of the tutorial and on the tutorial listing page
author: the author(s) of the tutorial. Ccrrelates to your handle located in /src/data/authors.json
featuredTutorial: determines if tutorial should be featured on the homepage
featuredVideo: the iframe src of the video that appears at the top of the tutorial
featuredImage: the Cloudinary URL of the image that appears at the top of the tutorial and on the tutorial listing page
tags: the tag(s) the tutorial belongs to. an array containing any number of the following:
- - AI engineering
  - actions
  - apps
  - cdp
  - cohorts
  - configuration
  - dashboards
  - data management
  - data warehouse
  - events
  - experimentation
  - feature flags
  - filters
  - funnels
  - group analytics
  - heatmaps
  - hogql
  - insights
  - lifecycle
  - persons
  - product analytics
  - product os
  - retention
  - sentry
  - session replay
  - session replays
  - sessions
  - settings
  - site-apps
  - stickiness
  - subscriptions
  - surveys
  - toolbar
  - trends
  - user paths
  - web analytics
  - zapier
seo: object containing SEO metadata:
- metaTitle: String
- metaDescription: String

Docs & Handbook

Markdown files located in /contents/docs and /contents/handbook

markdown

---
title: Contribute to the website: documentation, handbook, and blog
---

title: the title that appears at the top of the handbook / doc page
seo: object containing SEO metadata:
- metaTitle: String
- metaDescription: String

Comparison pages

Create a table on a "PostHog vs..." page with the following components. (You can see examples of how this is used in this pull request.)

Import the components at the top of the post content (after frontmatter):

import { ComparisonTable } from 'components/ComparisonTable'
import { ComparisonRow } from 'components/ComparisonTable/row'
import { ComparisonHeader } from 'components/ComparisonTable/header'

Create a table like:

<ComparisonTable column1="Company name 1" column2="Company name 2">
  <ComparisonHeader category="Optional header row" />
  <ComparisonRow column1={true} column2="Text" feature="Feature name" description="Feature description" />
</ComparisonTable>

In ComparisonRow:

Values for column1 and column2 can be: {true} | {false} | "Text string"
feature is required but description can be omitted (only if not using that column for the entire table)

Customers

Markdown files located in /contents/customers

markdown

---
title: How Hasura improved conversion rates by 10-20% with PostHog
customer: Hasura
logo: https://res.cloudinary.com/dmukukwp6/image/upload/posthog.com/contents/images/customers/hasura/logo.svg
featuredImage: https://res.cloudinary.com/dmukukwp6/image/upload/posthog.com/contents/images/customers/hasura/featured.jpg
industries:
    - Developer tool
users:
    - Engineering
    - UI
    - UX
    - Marketing teams
toolsUsed:
    - Funnel Analysis
    - Session Recording
    - Self-Hosting
---

title: the title of the case study
customer: the name of the customer
logo: the customer logo
featuredImage: the Cloudinary URL of the image that appears in the card on the customers listing page
industries: a list of industries that apply to the company
users: a list of user types that use the company's product
toolsUsed: a list of highlighted PostHog tools used by the company
seo: object containing SEO metadata:
- metaTitle: String
- metaDescription: String

Plain

If the file doesn't reside in one of the above folders, it uses the plain template.

markdown

---
title: Example Components
showTitle: false
width: lg
noindex: true
---

title: the title that appears at the top of the page
showTitle: false - if omitted, the title will appear at the top of the page
width: sm | md | lg | full - determines the width of the page
noindex: true | false - determines whether to index the page or not
seo: object containing SEO metadata:
- metaTitle: String
- metaDescription: String

You can often refer to the source of existing pages for more examples, but if in doubt, you can always ask for help.

Images/GIFs

If you need to upload images, you can upload them to Cloudinary

To include an image in a markdown file, you can use Cloudinary URLs, like so:

markdown

![Twin Peaks](https://res.cloudinary.com/dmukukwp6/image/upload/v1710055416/posthog.com/contents/handbook/engineering/images/02/IMG_4294-scaled.jpg)

In this case, Twin Peaks is the alt-text applied to the image.

Once you've made a new markdown file, you should link to it from the sidebar where appropriate.

The sidebar is generated from src/navs/index.js.

Redirects

Redirects are managed in vercel.json which is located in the root folder.

To declare a new redirect, open vercel.json and add an entry to the redirects list:

{ "source": "/docs/contributing/stack", "destination": "/docs/contribute/stack" }

The default HTTP status code is 308 (permanent), but if the redirect should be temporary (307), it can be updated like this:

{ "source": "/docs/contributing/stack", "destination": "/docs/contribute/stack", "permanent": false }

Committing changes

It's best to create commits that are focused on one specific area. For example, create one commit for textual changes and another for functional ones. Another example is creating a commit for changes to a section of the handbook and a different commit for updates to the documentation. This helps the pull request review process and also means specific commits can be cherry picked.

via the command line
First, stage your changes:
Terminal
```
git add [path-to-file]
```
For example:
Terminal
```
git add contents/docs/contribute/updating-documentation.md
```
Once all the files that have been changed are staged, you can perform the commit:
Terminal
```
git commit -m '[short commit message]'
```
For example:
Terminal
```
git commit -m 'Adding details on how to commit'
```
via GitHub Desktop
Files that have been changed can be viewed within GitHub Desktop along with a diff of the specific change.

Select the files that you want to be part of the commit by ensuring the checkbox to the left of the file is checked within GitHub Desktop. Then, write a short descriptive commit message and click the Commit to... button.

Push changes to GitHub

In order to request that the changes you have made are merged into the main website branch you must first push them to GitHub.

via the command line

Terminal

git push origin [branch-name]

For example:

Terminal

git push origin posthog-website-contribution

When this is done, the command line will show output similar to the following:

Terminal

posthog-website-contribution $ git push origin posthog-website-contribution
Total 0 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 0
remote: 
remote: Create a pull request for 'posthog-website-contribution' on GitHub by visiting:
remote:      https://github.com/PostHog/posthog.com/pull/new/posthog-website-contribution
remote: 
To github.com:PostHog/posthog.com.git
* [new branch]        posthog-website-contribution -> posthog-website-contribution

This output tells you that you can create a pull request by visiting a link. In the case above, the link is https://github.com/PostHog/posthog.com/pull/new/posthog-website-contribution. Follow the link to complete your pull request.

via GitHub Desktop
Once you have committed the changes you want to push to GitHub, click the Push origin button.

Create a pull request

Create a pull request to request that your changes be merged into the main branch of the repository.

via the command line

Navigate to the link shown when you push your branch to GitHub. For example, https://github.com/PostHog/posthog.com/pull/new/posthog-website-contribution shown below:

Terminal

posthog-website-contribution $ git push origin posthog-website-contribution
Total 0 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 0
remote: 
remote: Create a pull request for 'posthog-website-contribution' on GitHub by visiting:
remote:      https://github.com/PostHog/posthog.com/pull/new/posthog-website-contribution
remote: 
To github.com:PostHog/posthog.com.git
* [new branch]        posthog-website-contribution -> posthog-website-contribution

via GitHub Desktop
With the branch published, click the Create pull request button.

This will open up a page on github.com in your default web browser.

If you are pushing to an existing branch, navigate to the posthog.com repo and switch to the new branch using the dropdown:

GitHub branch switcher

Then, open the Contribute dropdown and click the Open pull request button.

Make the pull request title descriptive name and complete the detail requested in the body.

If you know who you would like to review the pull request, select them in the Reviewers dropdown.

Preview branch

After a series of checks are run (to ensure nothing in your pull request breaks the website), Vercel will generate a preview link available in the Vercel bot comment. This includes all of your changes, so you can preview before your pull request is merged.

An initial build can take up to 50 minutes to run. After the initial build, subsequent builds should complete in under ~15 minutes. We're limited to two concurrent builds, so if there's a backlog, this process can take longer.

Because Vercel charges per seat, we don't automatically invite all team members to our Vercel account. If your build fails, you can run yarn build locally to see what's erroring out. If nothing is erroring locally, it's likely the build timed out in Vercel. The Website & Docs team monitors for failed builds, so they'll re-run it for you. If the build is urgent, give a shout in #team-website-and-docs and someone with Vercel access can trigger a rebuild for you.

Preview branch

Note: Checks are run automatically for PostHog org members and previous contributors. First time contributors will require authorization for checks to be run by a PostHog org member.

Deployment

To get changes into production, the website deploys automatically from master. The build takes up to an hour, but can be delayed if other preview builds are in the queue.

Acknowledgements

This website is based on Gatsby and is hosted with Vercel.

Option 1: Running with codespaces

Creating/running the codespace

Committing and pushing changes

Stopping the server

Notes

Option 2: Editing posthog.com locally

Before you begin

Cloning the posthog.com repository

Running posthog.com locally

Environment variables

Finding the content to edit

Making edits

Creating a new Git branch

Markdown details

Frontmatter

Blog

Tutorials

Docs & Handbook

Comparison pages

Customers

Plain

Images/GIFs

Links to/from the navigation

Redirects

Committing changes

Push changes to GitHub

Create a pull request

Preview branch

Deployment

Acknowledgements

Questions?

Was this page useful?

How PostHog.com works

Cory Watilo

annapowellsmith

Eli Kinsey