Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Apps
  3. content-data-api
Warning This document has not been updated for a while now. It may be out of date.
Last updated: 18 Mar 2021

content-data-api: Set up Google Analytics credentials in development

To be able to import data from Google Analytics, a few environment variables need to be set.

  1. Create files config/local_env.yml

N.B. This file has been added to .gitignore, so you don't need to worry about accidentally checking it in.

local_env.yml is used to

  • Create the environment variables required to connect to and query the Google API for Google Analytics
  • Store your Google API credentials. They can either be downloaded from the google developers console or from another team member.
  1. Add an entry to config/local_env.yml for each of the following:
  • GOOGLE_PRIVATE_KEY
  • GOOGLE_CLIENT_EMAIL
  • GOOGLE_ANALYTICS_GOVUK_VIEW_ID

e.g.

GOOGLE_ANALYTICS_GOVUK_VIEW_ID: "1234567"

This will make "1234567" available as ENV["GOOGLE_ANALYTICS_GOVUK_VIEW_ID"]

GOOGLE_ANALYTICS_GOVUK_VIEW_ID is the view id on Google Analytics for www.gov.uk

See "Option Three" in Rails Environment Variables for more information

Update facts table with GA metrics

To populate GA metrics for a given day, open a Rails console and run:

> GA.process(Date.today)

It is recommended you disable logging to speed up the process:

Google::Apis.logger.level = Logger::ERROR
ActiveRecord::Base.logger = nil