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        • Overview
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        • Overview
        • 0001-events-sample-by
        • 0002_events_sample_by
        • 0003_fill_person_distinct_id2
        • ClickHouse
          • Backup
          • Debug hanging / freezing process
          • Horizontal scaling (Sharding & replication)
          • Kafka Engine
          • Resize disk
          • Restore
          • Vertical scaling
        • Kafka
          • Resize disk
          • Log retention
        • PostgreSQL
          • Resize disk
          • Troubleshooting long-running migrations
        • Plugin server
          • Overview
          • Ingestion lag
          • Jobs not executing
          • Scheduled tasks not executing
        • MinIO
        • Redis
        • Zookeeper
      • Disaster recovery
    • Troubleshooting and FAQs
    • Overview
    • Ingest live data
    • Ingest historical data
    • Identify users
    • User properties
    • Using a CDP
    • Deploying a reverse proxy
    • Library comparison
    • Badge
    • Browser extensions
      • Snippet installation
      • Android
      • iOS
      • JavaScript
      • Flutter
      • React Native
      • Node.js
      • Go
      • Python
      • Rust
      • Java
      • PHP
      • Ruby
      • Elixir
      • Docusaurus v2
      • Gatsby
      • Google Tag Manager
      • Next.js
      • Nuxt.js
      • Retool
      • RudderStack
      • Segment
      • Sentry
      • Slack
      • Shopify
      • WordPress
      • Message formatting
      • Microsoft Teams
      • Slack
      • Discord
    • Migrate between PostHog instances
    • Migrate from Amplitude
    • Migrate to PostHog Cloud EU
    • To another self-hosted instance
    • Export your events
    • Overview
    • Tutorial
    • Troubleshooting
    • Developer reference
    • Using the PostHog API
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    • Testing
    • TypeScript types
    • Overview
    • POST-only public endpoints
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      • Event Replicator
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      • GitLab Release Tracker
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      • Ingestion Alert
      • Email Scoring
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      • Orbit Connector
      • Redshift Import
      • Rudderstack Import
      • Segment Connector
      • Shopify Connector
      • Stripe Connector
      • Twitter Followers Tracker
      • Zendesk Connector
      • Airbyte Exporter
      • Amazon S3 Export
      • Avo Inspector
      • BigQuery Export
      • Customer.io Connector
      • Databricks Export
      • Engage Connector
      • GCP Pub/Sub Connector
      • Google Cloud Storage Export
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      • Intercom Connector
      • PagerDuty Connector
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      • Redshift Export
      • RudderStack Export
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      • Sendgrid Connector
      • Sentry Connector
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      • Zapier Connector
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      • First Time Event Tracker
      • Property Filter
      • Property Flattener
      • Schema Enforcer
      • Taxonomy Standardizer
      • Unduplicator
      • Advanced GeoIP Enricher
      • Automatic Cohort Creator
      • Currency Normalizer
      • GeoIP Enricher
      • Timestamp Parser
      • URL Normalizer
      • User Agent Populator
      • Pineapple Mode
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    • Cohorts
    • Configuration
    • Data management
    • Dashboards
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Toolbar

Last updated: Nov 28, 2022

On this page

  • How to activate the Toolbar
  • Toolbar features
  • Toolbar not loading or displaying?

In simple terms, the Toolbar is like 'Inspect Element' in a dev tool, but for user behavior.

When enabled, the Toolbar appears as an overlay (not visible to your users) and you will be able to seamlessly interact with the elements on your page to create Actions, get information about the most frequently triggered events, visualize statistics via a heatmap, and more.

For an in-depth tutorial on how to visualize user behavior, check out our Toolbar tutorial

How to activate the Toolbar

  • Go to 'Project Settings' in the left-hand menu
  • Scroll down until you see the option to 'Enable PostHog Toolbar'
  • Once enabled, the Toolbar logo will appear as an overlay, visible only to you (not your users)
  • Click on the Toolbar to authenticate it
  • Hover over the Toolbar to access the various features

Toolbar features

  • Inspect. With the PostHog Toolbar, you are able to get the class and id of an element much faster and without any extra noise. Click the element to inspect and you'll have access to everything you need to know about that element.
  • Heatmap. Easily see the ranking of which parts of the page your users are interacting with the most.
  • Actions. Inspect an element, see how often it has triggered an event, and immediately create an Action with that data. With the Toolbar, everything you need to tailor your analytics is right in front of you: your website, the user data, and the functionality to create an Action.
  • Feature flags. See which feature flags are turned on for a particular page.

Toolbar not loading or displaying?

When launched, the toolbar injects an API token in the format #__posthog=JSON in your site's URL, like this: http://mysite.com/#__posthog=JSON.

The toolbar won't load if you have a frontend that overrides the injected API token (the information after the #) before the posthog-js library (or snippet) loads and has a chance to read the API token.

To solve this, get the __posthog JSON from the URL before it is overridden and call posthog.loadToolbar(JSON):

JavaScript
const toolbarJSON = new URLSearchParams(window.location.hash.substring(1)).get('__posthog')
if (toolbarJSON) {
posthog.loadToolbar(JSON.parse(toolbarJSON))
}

We are also working on other solutions. Go to the related issue to see progress (and encourage us to get it done faster).

Questions?

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Next article

Session Recording

Session Recording allows you to record users navigating through your website and play back the individual sessions to watch how real users use your product. Using Session Recording Recordings can only be used with our JavaScript library and requires the feature to be enabled in PostHog's Project Settings ( /project/settings ). Once enabled, the JS library will start recording sessions by default. Recordings can be toggled on and off in the JS library by appropriately setting the config…

Read next article

Authors

  • Ian Vanagas
    Ian Vanagas
  • Paul Hultgren
    Paul Hultgren

Feature availability

Free / Open-sourceAvailable
Self-serveAvailable
EnterpriseAvailable

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