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Minh-Phuc Tran
Minh-Phuc Tran

Posted on • Originally published at phuctm97.com

How-to Integrate Plausible Analytics With Next.js and Vercel

Plausible is a privacy-focused analytics solution for modern websites. It and Fathom are probably 2 biggest names in the space. I chose Plausible because its pricing is more beginner-friendly and it is also open-source.

This article is a quick snippnet that I wrote to properly enable Plausible for my Next.js + Vercel website.

Plausible Script component

To enable Plausible, you'll need place a script tag in head of your HTML document. To achieve that in Next.js, I create a component for easier maintainance:

// ~/components/plausbile-script.tsx
import Head from "next/head";
import PKG from "~/package.json"; // Load configuration from package.json.

const PlausibleScript = () => (
  <Head>
    <script
      key="plausible-script"
      src={PKG.site.plausible.scriptURL}
      async
      defer
      data-domain={new URL(PKG.homepage).host}
    />
  </Head>
);
export default PlausibleScript;
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Then render it in my pages/_app.(jsx|tsx):

// ~/pages/_app.tsx
import PlausibleScript from "~/components/plausible-script";

const MyApp = ({ Component, pageProps }: AppProps) => (
  <>
    <Head>
      <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0" />
      {/* Other head elements */}
    </Head>
    <PlausibleScript />
    <Component {...pageProps} />
  </>
);
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Put configuration in package.json

You may realize that my PlausibleScript doesn't directly define script src, instead it references values from package.json. Personally, package.json is a great place to put configuration for a site or package (the name said it, right?), package.json isn't just for npm.

// ~/package.json
{
  // ...
  "description": "🏚 Home on the Web β€” Everything I learned and created: software dev, programming tutorials, career, startups, and open-source.",
  "homepage": "https://phuctm97.com",
  "site": {
    "title": "Minh-Phuc Tran - Software Engineer",
    "plausible": {
      "scriptURL": "https://plausible.phuctm97.com/js/index.js"
    }
  }
  // Other values...
  // Keep configuration in package.json is also a great way to separate implementation details and configurations.
}
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Doing this way I can also reuse standard npm values , in this case, it is homepage.

Enable only in production

Finally, I don't want views on my local and preview environment to be counted, Plausible should only be enabled in production. To achieve that, I simply update my _app.tsx:

// ~/pages/_app.tsx
import PlausibleScript from "~/components/plausible-script";
import { IS_PRODUCTION } from "~/constants";

const MyApp = ({ Component, pageProps }: AppProps) => (
  <>
    <Head>
      <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0" />
      {/* Other head elements */}
    </Head>
    {IS_PRODUCTION && <PlausibleScript />}
    <Component {...pageProps} />
  </>
);
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Because I'm hosting my site on Vercel, IS_PRODUCTION is:

// ~/constants.ts
export const IS_PRODUCTION =
  process.env.NODE_ENV === "production" &&
  process.env.VERCEL_ENV === "production";
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VERCEL_ENV is a system environment variable defined by Vercel while building and running your applications for specific environments (preview and production). To be able to reference it client-side in a Next.js application, you'll need to modify your next.config.js:

module.exports = {
  // Other configurations.
  env: {
    VERCEL_ENV: process.env.VERCEL_ENV,
  },
};
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That's it 🀟🏻!

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