merlyn:visitor is forked from useful:visitor in order to make it compatible with meteor 2.4 or higher.

Simple user tracking baked into your app so you can control and manipulate the data.

Example:

Server server/lib/visitor.js

Visitor.init();

Client client/lib/visitor.js

Visitor.init({
	subscribe: true
});

Adds the packages merlyn:visitor-client and merlyn:visitor-server to your app automatically.

meteor add merlyn:visitor

You must call init on the server to support anonymous user tracking.

The reason is that you have a choice of where to store the anonymous data.

{
	collection: your choice to name the collection
}

You must call init on the client to begin anonymous user tracking.

The reason is that you have a choice of where to store the anonymous data in case you want to offload this functionality to another server.

{
	collection: your choice to name the collection
	, connection: your choice of DDP connection to use
	, localStorageKey: your choice of what key to use to store the anonymous id in local storage
	, subscribe: true/false if you want to automatically subscribe to the current visitor's document (default **false**)
}

Reactively returns the randomly generated id of the current anonymous visitor (still exists when user is logged in).

Reactively returns the document of the current anonymous visitor (still exists when user is logged in).

Properties that may be available on the document by default are:

{
	"_id" : "zfPeaxykvcuSSSu6f",
	"visitorId" : "2Jqa6GmSTXFWkoWX7",
	"userId" : "yQyrEySmi8mS8xgtH",
	"createdAt" : ISODate("2015-04-27T02:59:19.088Z"),
	"startPage" : "http://localhost:3000/proposal/N6gJbEvJm2dyGfMQm/send",
	"lastSeen" : ISODate("2015-04-27T03:01:12.235Z"),
	"lastSeenOnPage" : "http://localhost:3000/"
}

You built an app, and people are using it, nice work hot shot!

But what are your users doing?

That's really important but not always obvious. And if you're going to start tracking that yourself (because you like your data) you need a way to identify anonymous visitors.

Now you can automatically collect basic information about visitors to your app (logged in or not) and actually work with that data directly in your code, hooray!