Render — Manual Setup

Add JustAnalytics to a Render-deployed service by setting environment variables and initialising the Node SDK.

Render — Manual Setup

JustAnalytics works on any Render service — Web Services, Background Workers, Cron Jobs, Private Services. This page describes the manual setup that works today.

A Render Blueprint / one-click installer is on the roadmap — see Future Work below.

Time to data: 3 minutes

Prerequisites#

A JustAnalytics account with at least one site
A Render service in any runtime (Node, Python, Go, Ruby, Docker, etc.)

Step 1 — Add environment variables on Render#

In your Render service: Environment → Environment Variables → Add. Add the following, sourced from your JustAnalytics dashboard's API Keys page:

JUSTANALYTICS_SITE_ID=cmkc0xbe70001fdge4feizme8
JUSTANALYTICS_API_KEY=ja_prod_XXXXXXXXXXXX

Render exposes the deploy's commit SHA as RENDER_GIT_COMMIT — useful for release tracking in the next step.

Step 2 — Initialise the SDK for your runtime#

Pick the SDK for the language your service runs. The pattern is the same: read the env vars at startup, hand them to init(). See the dedicated Node, Python, Go, Ruby, or other SDK docs for full setup.

Example for a Node.js service on Render:

// In your app's entrypoint, BEFORE importing express
import JA from '@justanalyticsapp/node';

JA.init({
  apiKey: process.env.JUSTANALYTICS_API_KEY,
  serviceName: process.env.RENDER_SERVICE_NAME ?? 'my-render-service',
  environment: 'production',
  release: process.env.RENDER_GIT_COMMIT,
});

import express from 'express';
const app = express();
// HTTP, DB, fetch — all auto-traced from here on

Render exposes several useful build-time variables you can pass through:

RENDER_SERVICE_NAME    — name of the service in the Render UI
RENDER_GIT_COMMIT      — commit hash of the deployed code
RENDER_GIT_BRANCH      — branch name
RENDER_INSTANCE_ID     — unique ID of the running instance
IS_PULL_REQUEST        — "true" for PR preview environments

Step 3 — (Optional) Add the frontend script if you serve HTML#

If the Render service also serves a frontend (SSR app, traditional MVC, etc.), add the tracker to your root template's <head>:

<script
  defer
  src="https://justanalytics.app/tracker.js"
  data-site-id="cmkc0xbe70001fdge4feizme8">
</script>

For services that only expose an API (no HTML output), skip this step — the SDK on Step 2 is enough.

Verification#

Hit your Render service from the browser or curl and watch the JustAnalytics dashboard — the request should appear as a trace within seconds.

Future Work#

A Render Blueprint (render.yaml) for one-click setup is on the roadmap. When published it will:

Provision a JustAnalytics-ready service configuration with all required env vars pre-defined
Wire the deploy webhook so every Render deploy becomes a release event in JustAnalytics
Optionally bundle the JustAnalytics CLI for source-map uploads as a build step

Until then, the manual setup above gives you the full telemetry — you wire the env vars and SDK init yourself.