@amplitude/session-replay-browser

@amplitude/session-replay-browser

Official Session Replay SDK

Installation

This package is published on NPM registry and is available to be installed using npm and yarn.

# npm
npm install @amplitude/session-replay-browser

# yarn
yarn add @amplitude/session-replay-browser

Usage

This SDK provides access to the Amplitude Session Replay product.

This plugin requires that default tracking for sessions is enabled. If default tracking for sessions is not enabled in the config, the plugin will automatically enable it.

1. Import Amplitude packages

• @amplitude/session-replay-browser

import * as sessionReplay from '@amplitude/session-replay-browser';

2. Initialize session replay collection

The SDK must be configured via the following code. This call kicks off collection of replays for the user.

sessionReplay.init(API_KEY, {
  deviceId: DEVICE_ID,
  sessionId: SESSION_ID,
  sampleRate: 0.5,
});

3. Evaluate targeting (optional)

Any event that occurs within the span of a session replay must be passed to the SDK to evaluate against targeting conditions. This should be done before step 4, getting the event properties. If you are not using the targeting condition logic provided via the Amplitude UI, this step is not required.

const sessionTargetingMatch = sessionReplay.evaluateTargetingAndCapture({ event: {
  event_type: EVENT_NAME,
  time: EVENT_TIMESTAMP,
  event_properties: eventProperties
} });

4. Get session replay event properties

Any event that occurs within the span of a session replay must be tagged with properties that signal to Amplitude to include it in the scope of the replay. The following shows an example of how to use the properties

const sessionReplayProperties = sessionReplay.getSessionReplayProperties();
track(EVENT_NAME, {
  ...eventProperties,
  ...sessionReplayProperties
})

5. Update session id

Any time that the session id for the user changes, the session replay SDK must be notified of that change. Update the session id via the following method:

sessionReplay.setSessionId(UNIX_TIMESTAMP)

You can optionally pass a new device id as a second argument as well:

sessionReplay.setSessionId(UNIX_TIMESTAMP, deviceId)

6. Shutdown (optional)

If at any point you would like to discontinue collection of session replays, for example in a part of your application where you would not like sessions to be collected, you can use the following method to stop collection and remove collection event listeners.

sessionReplay.shutdown()

Options

Name	Type	Required	Default	Description
deviceId	string	Yes	undefined	Sets an identifier for the device running your application.
sessionId	number	Yes	undefined	Sets an identifier for the users current session. The value must be in milliseconds since epoch (Unix Timestamp).
sampleRate	number	No	0	Use this option to control how many sessions will be selected for replay collection. A selected session will be collected for replay, while sessions that are not selected will not. The number should be a decimal between 0 and 1, ie 0.01, representing the fraction of sessions you would like to have randomly selected for replay collection. Over a large number of sessions, 0.01 would select 1% of those sessions.
optOut	boolean	No	false	Sets permission to collect replays for sessions. Setting a value of true prevents Amplitude from collecting session replays.
flushMaxRetries	number	No	2	Sets the maximum number of retries for failed upload attempts. This is only applicable to retryable errors.
logLevel	number	No	LogLevel.Warn	LogLevel.None or LogLevel.Error or LogLevel.Warn or LogLevel.Verbose or LogLevel.Debug. Sets the log level.
loggerProvider	Logger	No	Logger	Sets a custom loggerProvider class from the Logger to emit log messages to desired destination.
serverZone	string	No	US	EU or US. Sets the Amplitude server zone. Set this to EU for Amplitude projects created in EU data center.
privacyConfig	object	No	undefined	Supports advanced masking configs with CSS selectors.
debugMode	boolean	No	false	Adds additional debug event property to help debug instrumentation issues (such as mismatching apps). Only recommended for debugging initial setup, and not recommended for production.
configServerUrl	string	No	undefined	Specifies the endpoint URL to fetch remote configuration. If provided, it overrides the default server zone configuration.
trackServerUrl	string	No	undefined	Specifies the endpoint URL for sending session replay data. If provided, it overrides the default server zone configuration.
shouldInlineStylesheet	boolean	No	true	If stylesheets are inlined, the contents of the stylesheet will be stored. During replay, the stored stylesheet will be used instead of attempting to fetch it remotely. This prevents replays from appearing broken due to missing stylesheets. Note: Inlining stylesheets may not work in all cases. If this is undefined stylesheets will be inlined.
storeType	string	No	idb	Specifies how replay events should be stored. idb uses IndexedDB to persist replay events when all events cannot be sent during capture. memory stores replay events only in memory, meaning events are lost when the page is closed. If IndexedDB is unavailable, the system falls back to memory.
performanceConfig.enabled	boolean	No	true	If enabled, event compression will be deferred to occur during the browser's idle periods.
performanceConfig.timeout	number	No	undefined	Optional timeout in milliseconds for the requestIdleCallback API. If specified, this value will be used to set a maximum time for the browser to wait before executing the deferred compression task, even if the browser is not idle.
experimental.useWebWorker	boolean	No	false	If the SDK should compress the replay events using a webworker.

Bundle Size Optimization

The Session Replay SDK uses dynamic imports to optimize bundle size and improve initial page load performance. Key modules are loaded on-demand rather than being included in the initial bundle:

• @amplitude/rrweb-record: The core recording functionality is dynamically imported when sessionReplay.init() is called and capture should begin. In cases where users are not sampled or have opted out, then the Session Replay SDK will not import these dependencies.

This approach ensures that:

• Your application's initial JavaScript bundle remains as small as possible.
• Only the necessary Session Replay dependencies are loaded.

The dynamic imports happen asynchronously and won't block your application's initialization. If the imports fail for any reason, the SDK will not initiate capture.

Privacy

By default, the session replay will mask all inputs, meaning the text in inputs will appear in a session replay as asterisks: ***. You may require more specific masking controls based on your use case, so we offer the following controls:

1. Unmask inputs

In your application code, add the class .amp-unmask to any input whose text you'd like to have unmasked in the replay. In the session replay, it will be possible to read the exact text entered into an input with this class, the text will not be converted to asterisks.

2. Mask non-input elements

In your application code, add the class .amp-mask to any non-input element whose text you'd like to have masked from the replay. The text in the element, as well as it's children, will all be converted to asterisks.

3. Block non-text elements

In your application code, add the class .amp-block to any element you would like to have blocked from the collection of the replay. The element will appear in the replay as a placeholder with the same dimensions.

4. Block elements by CSS selectors.

In the SDK initialization code, you can configure the SDK to block elements based on CSS selectors.

sessionReplay.init(AMPLITUDE_API_KEY, {
  sampleRate: 0.01, 
  privacyConfig: {
      blockSelector: ['.ignoreClass', '#ignoreId']
  }
})