Events API reference
The Plausible Events API can be used to record pageviews and custom events. This is useful when tracking Android or iOS mobile apps, or for server side tracking.
In most cases we recommend installing Plausible through our provided script or one of the many integration packages listed here. However, if there's no easy way for you to integrate with Plausible, you can still do so by sending events directly to our API.
Unique visitor tracking
Important! Special care should be taken with two key headers which are used for unique visitor counting:
- The User-Agent header
- The X-Forwarded-For header
If these headers are not sent exactly as required, unique visitor counting will not work as intended. Please refer to the Request headers section below for more in-depth documentation on each header separately.
Endpoints
POST /api/event
Records a pageview or custom event. When using this endpoint, it's crucial to send the HTTP headers correctly, since these are used for unique user counting.
curl -i -X POST https://plausible.io/api/event \
-H 'User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_6) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/85.0.4183.121 Safari/537.36 OPR/71.0.3770.284' \
-H 'X-Forwarded-For: 127.0.0.1' \
-H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
--data '{"name":"pageview","url":"http://dummy.site","domain":"dummy.site"}'
{}
Request headers
User-Agent REQUIRED
The raw value of User-Agent is used to calculate the user_id which identifies a unique visitor in Plausible.
User-Agent is also used to populate the Devices report in your Plausible dashboard. The device data is derived from the open source database device-detector. If your User-Agent is not showing up in your dashboard, it's probably because it is not recognized as one in the device-detector database.
X-Forwarded-For REQUIRED
Used to get the IP address of the client. The IP address is used to calculate the user_id which identifies a unique visitor in Plausible. The raw value is anonymized and not stored. If the header contains a comma-separated list (as it should if the request is sent through a chain of proxies), then the first valid IP address from the list is used.
More information can be found on MDN docs.
Content-Type REQUIRED
Must be either application/json or text/plain. In case of text/plain, the request body is still interpreted as JSON.
Request body JSON parameters
domain REQUIRED
Domain name of the site in Plausible
This is the domain name you used when you added your site to your Plausible account. It doesn't need to be an actual domain name, so when adding your mobile app to Plausible, you could insert the mobile app name in the domain name field
name REQUIRED
Name of the event. Can specify pageview
which is a special type of event in Plausible. All other names will be treated as
custom events.
url REQUIRED
URL of the page where the event was triggered. If the URL contains UTM parameters, they will be extracted and stored. When using the script, this is set to window.location.href
.
The maximum size of the URL, excluding the domain and the query string, is 2,000 characters. Additionally, URLs using the data URI scheme are not supported by the API.
The URL parameter will feel strange in a mobile app but you can manufacture something that looks like a web URL. If you name your mobile app screens like page URLs, Plausible will know how to handle it. So for example, on your login screen you could send something like:
event: pageview
url: app://localhost/login
The pathname (/login) is what will be shown as the page value in the Plausible dashboard.
referrer optional
Referrer for this event. When using the standard tracker script, this is set to document.referrer
Referrer values are processed heavily for better usability. Consider referrer
URLS like m.facebook.com/some-path
and facebook.com/some-other-path
. It's intuitive to think of both of these as coming from a single source: Facebook. In the first example the referrer
value would be split into visit:source == Facebook
and visit:referrer == m.facebook.com/some-path
.
Plausible uses the open source referer-parser database to parse referrers and assign these source categories.
When no match has been found, the value of the referrer
field will be parsed as an URL. The hostname will be used as the visit:source
and the full URL as the visit:referrer
.
So if you send https://some.domain.com/example-path
, it will be parsed as follows:
visit:source == some.domain.com
visit:referrer == some.domain.com/example-path
props optional
Custom properties for the event. These can be attached to both pageview and custom events. To learn more about using custom properties, you can check out these two links:
The value corresponding to the props
key in the request body is expected to be a JSON object. For example, if you're using the text/plain
content type, your request body might look like this:
'{"name":"pageview","url":"http://dummy.site","domain":"dummy.site","props":{"author":"John Doe","logged_in":"false"}}'
You can can use GET https://plausible.io/api/health endpoint to monitor the status of our API