How to migrate your PostHog self-hosted to PostHog Cloud

PostHog is an open-source product analytics tool that we use at Qovery to improve the developer experience. PostHog is similar to famous proprietary product analytics tools like Mixpanel, Heap, Amplitude.
Romaric Philogène

Romaric Philogène

August 29, 2021 · 4 min read
How to migrate your PostHog self-hosted to PostHog Cloud - Qovery

At Qovery, we were using PostHog self-hosted for 8 months in production. It was running nicely on Qovery (yes, we deployed PostHog with Qovery 😎 #eatYourOwnDogFood), but we decided to move to the PostHog Cloud. Here are the two main reasons why we decided to make this move:

If you are not yet using it, give it a try with Qovery or PostHog Cloud version.

  1. To support the PostHog project: Because we love their product, keeping them by using their Cloud version makes complete sense to us.
  2. Stay focused on our business: Using the self-hosted version of PostHog requires you to spend time to maintain it. Meaning, you have to handle the upgrade yourself and make sure the service is up and running all day long.

#How to migrate

Looking at their documentation, there is no guide to migrate from PostHog self-hosted to their Cloud version. I asked them the procedure on Slack, and Paolo from the PostHog team responded that it should not be too complicated to transfer the data by fetching the data from the PostHog source and pushing them to the PostHog destination via the web API.

Conversation with Paolo from Posthog on Slack
Conversation with Paolo from Posthog on Slack

So the idea was to make a Python script to fetch the data from our self-hosted PostHog instance and forward the data to the PostHog Cloud version.

(Self-hosted PostHog) <--[fetch event data via web API]-- Python Script --[send event data via web API]--> (PostHog Cloud)

#Before migrating

As I know that we have more than one million events to send, I notified the PostHog support team that we will migrate our self-hosted version. Just in case they have to adjust their infrastructure. Who knows :) Paolo (once again, he is everywhere 🙂) responded to me and was super proactive.

I encourage you always to keep informed the support team of service when you are about to migrate. They can help you. It was the case here with the PostHog support team.

#We can migrate now

To migrate, I made a simple Python script using no external dependencies. Only HTTP requests, and that's it. Note: This script is compatible with Python 3.6+.

#!/usr/bin/env python
import copy
import time
import uuid
from urllib.parse import urlparse

import requests

# Your source PostHog instance
source_posthog_scheme_and_host = 'https://posthog.your-domain.tld'

# Generate a personal API key to read the data from your source PostHog instance
source_api_key = 'xxx'

# Your project API key provided by PostHog in your project settings
dest_project_api_key = 'xxx'


def is_valid(key: str, data: dict) -> bool:
    """
    Helper function to check if the value is empty or none
    :param key: data key to check
    :param value: dict
    :return: true if valid (not empty, None), false otherwise
    """
    if key not in data or not data[key] or str(data[key]).strip().lower() == 'none':
        return False

    return True


def clean_source_data(results: [dict]) -> [dict]:
    """
    Clean up data from PostHog source
    Note: this function do not mutate `results`
    :param results:
    :return:
    """
    _results = []
    if not results:
        return _results

    distinct_id = 'distinct_id'

    for result in results:
        data = copy.deepcopy(result)
        del data['id']

        if not is_valid(distinct_id, data):
            data[distinct_id] = str(uuid.uuid4())

        if 'properties' in data:
            properties = data['properties']
            if not is_valid(distinct_id, properties):
                # copy distinct_id value from the parent object
                properties[distinct_id] = data[distinct_id]

        _results.append(data)

    return _results


def capture(data: [dict], count: int = 0):
    """
    Function to send data to the dest PostHog instance
    :param data:
    :param count:
    :return:
    """
    res = requests.post('https://app.posthog.com/capture', json={'api_key': dest_project_api_key, 'batch': data},
                        headers={'Content-type': 'application/json'})

    if res.status_code != 200:
        if count >= 100:
            print('retry exceeded')
            exit(1)
        time.sleep(3)
        print('Retry sending data (status code: {}) to dest PostHog with data {}'.format(res.status_code, data))
        return capture(data, count + 1)

    return res


def get_source_data() -> dict:
    headers = {'Authorization': 'Bearer {}'.format(source_api_key)}

    url = '{}/api/event'.format(source_posthog_scheme_and_host)

    with open('posthog_completed_urls', 'a') as f:
        while 1:
            query = urlparse(url).query
            if query:
                # PostHog return weird next URL with tons of 'before' params
                url = '{}/api/event?before={}'.format(source_posthog_scheme_and_host, query.split('=')[-1])

            res = requests.get(url, headers=headers)
            if res.status_code == 200:
                j_res = res.json()
                _data = clean_source_data(j_res['results'])

                yield _data

                f.write(url + '\n')
                url = j_res['next']
            else:
                print('Retry fetching events (status code: {}) from PostHog source with URL {}'.format(res.status_code, url))
                time.sleep(3)


if __name__ == '__main__':
    for data in get_source_data():
        capture(data)
        print('{} lines migrated'.format(len(data)))

    print('ok')

Before running the migration script, I strongly recommend making your apps send the data to the PostHog Cloud instance before and waiting for the old instance to stop receiving new events.

Now it is time to:

  1. Copy this script.
  2. Change the value of the variables source_posthog_scheme_and_host, source_api_key, dest_project_api_key
  3. Run the script and wait until it is done 👌

#Wrapping up

The migration went smoothly and took one day because we had more than 1 million events. We are super excited to use PostHog Cloud. It is fast and efficient for improving the developer experience on Qovery. Any questions about our usage of PostHog? Join our Discord to chat about it.

Resources:

  • PostHog: open-source product analytics tool.
  • Qovery: the simplest way to deploy your apps on AWS.

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Your Favorite Internal Developer Platform

Qovery is an Internal Developer Platform Helping 50.000+ Developers and Platform Engineers To Ship Faster.

Try it out now!