This repository showcases how to easily install and deploy PostHog into CapRover. The process should really take just a few minutes. 🏃♀️
CapRover provides zillions methods to deploy your app, since PostHog contains multiple services that depend on each other, this repository uses what's known in CapRover as One-Click Apps.
One click Apps are easy to use because it allows to deploy applications with minimal configuration and comes with a pre-configured template (posthog-deploy.yml) that contains all the services needed to run PostHog with all necessary configuration. You'll notice that the template file is much like a docker compose file where each service has its configuration. More information on One-Click Apps here.
- A machine with at least 8GB of RAM
- Docker
- Ubuntu 20.04 or above (WSL works too)
Install CapRover on a VPS or locally. Running it locally is usually easier to get started.
The link above contains all the steps for a local installation, but here’s a condensed version of what you need to run:
sudo mkdir -p /captain/data
sudo echo "{\"skipVerifyingDomains\":\"true\"}" | sudo tee /captain/data/config-override.json > /dev/null
docker run -e ACCEPTED_TERMS=true -e MAIN_NODE_IP_ADDRESS=127.0.0.1 -p 80:80 -p 443:443 -p 3000:3000 -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock -v /captain:/captain caprover/caproverWait 60 seconds and navigate to http://localhost:3000 and change your root domain to captain.localhost. CapRover now is ready to deploy PostHog. ✔️
To deploy PostHog, we'll use a CapRover template file (posthog-deploy.yml). The template file will be used to deploy several services required by PostHog.
Follow the steps below:
-
Go to
Apps->One Click Apps, navigate to the bottom of the page and click>> TEMPLATE <<. -
Copy
posthog-deploy.ymlcontents and paste it inside the textbox to set up the necessary services, configurations, and environment variables.
Define the name of your app (e.g 'hobby'), if you wish you can leave the rest of the fields as they are. Just hit deploy!
CapRover will start deploying a bunch of services. There's two databases (postgres and clickhouse), redis, temporal (export data to the outside), kakfa, worker service, django in the backend, plugin-server for ingestion with TypeScript, phew! It's quite the app! Give it a few minutes and you'll see the ready message!
Once everything is deployed, check the web app in the in the Deployment tab. You can see the logs for the app, and you'll surely see migrations running for Postgres and Clickhouse. Only when these migrations are finnished, the django app will start, along with the worker, plugin services.
You are now ready to start using PostHog! Navigate to the HTTP link and you'll see PostHog preflight page. If you see a 502 error, most likely, posthog is still starting.
Below are two videos demonstrating how to install PostHog with CapRover:
During deployment, CapRover's nginx might timeout while registering your PostHog services (slower internet or hardware), with a 500 error.
You can also confirm the timeout using the following command:
docker service logs captain-nginx --since 15m --follow
To fix this, nagivate to Settings -> NGINX Configurations -> /etc/nginx/conf.d/captain-root.conf and change proxy_read_timeout 120s; to proxy_read_timeout 3600s;