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How to set up A/B tests in Laravel

Feb 07, 2024

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A/B tests help you improve your Laravel app by enabling you to compare the impact of changes on key metrics. To show you how to set one up, we create a basic Laravel app, add PostHog, create an A/B test, and implement the code for it.

1. Create a basic Laravel app

First, ensure PHP and Composer are installed. Then, create a new Laravel project called laravel-ab-tests:

Terminal
composer create-project laravel/laravel laravel-ab-tests
cd laravel-ab-tests

Next, replace the code in resources/views/welcome.blade.php with a simple heading and paragraph:

resources/views/welcome.blade.php
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<body>
  <h1>Laravel A/B testing tutorial</h1>
  <p>{{ $paragraphText }}</p>
</body>
</html>

Replace the code in routes/web.php with a route to return our view:

routes/web.php
<?php


use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Route;


Route::get('/', function () {
    $paragraphText = 'Placeholder text';
    return view('welcome', ['paragraphText' => $paragraphText]);
});

Run php artisan serve and navigate to http://127.0.0.1:8000 to see our app in action.

Basic Laravel app

2. Add PostHog to your app

With our app set up, it’s time to install and set up PostHog. If you don't have a PostHog instance, you can sign up for free.

To start, run composer require posthog/posthog-php to install PostHog’s PHP SDK.

Next, we initialize PostHog in the boot method of app/Providers/AppServiceProvider.php. Replace the existing code in that file with the following:

app/Providers/AppServiceProvider.php
<?php


namespace App\Providers;


use Illuminate\Support\ServiceProvider;
use PostHog\PostHog;


class AppServiceProvider extends ServiceProvider
{
    public function boot(): void
    {
        PostHog::init(
            '<ph_project_api_key>',
            [
                'host' => https://us.i.posthog.com
            ]
        );
    }
}

You can find your project API key and instance address in your project settings.

Lastly, we capture a $pageview event with PostHog in our route:

routes/web.php
<?php


use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Route;
use PostHog\PostHog;


Route::get('/', function () {
    $paragraphText = 'Placeholder text';
    $distinctId = 'placeholder-user-id'; 


    PostHog::capture([
        'distinctId' => $distinctId,
        'event' => '$pageview'
    ]);


    return view('welcome', ['paragraphText' => $paragraphText]);
});

With this set up, restart your app and then refresh your browser a few times. You should now see the captured event in your PostHog activity tab.

Events captured in PostHog

3. Create an A/B test in PostHog

If you haven't done so already, you'll need to upgrade your PostHog account to include A/B testing. This requires entering your credit card, but don't worry, we have a generous free tier of 1 million requests per month – so you won't be charged anything yet.

Next, go to the A/B testing tab and create an A/B test by clicking the New experiment button. Add the following details to your experiment:

  1. Name it "My cool experiment".
  2. Set "Feature flag key" to my-cool-experiment.
  3. Under the experiment goal, select the pageview event we captured in the previous step.
  4. Use the default values for all other fields.

Click "Save as draft" and then click "Launch".

Experiment setup in PostHog

4. Implement the A/B test code

To implement the A/B test, we:

  1. Fetch the my-cool-experiment flag using PostHog::getFeatureFlag().
  2. Update the paragraph text based on whether the user is in the control or test variant of the experiment.
routes/web.php
// rest of your code


Route::get('/', function () {
    $paragraphText = 'Placeholder text';
    $distinctId = 'placeholder-user-id'; 


    $enabledVariant = PostHog::getFeatureFlag(
        'my-cool-experiment',
        $distinctId
    );
    if ($enabledVariant === "control") {
        $paragraphText = "Control variant!";
    } else if ($enabledVariant === "test") {
        $paragraphText = "Test variant!";
    }


    // rest of your code


});

When you restart your app and refresh the page, you should see the text updated to either Control variant! or Test variant!.

💡 Setting the correct distinctId:

You may notice that we set distinctId = 'placeholder-user-id' in our flag call above. In production apps, to ensure you fetch the correct flag value for your user, distinctId should be set to their unique ID.

For logged-in users, you typically use their email or user ID as their distinctId. For logged-out users, assuming they made their request from a browser, you can use values from their request cookies. See an example of this in our Nuxt feature flags tutorial.

5. Include the feature flag when capturing your event

To ensure our goal metric is correctly calculated for each experiment variant, we need to include our feature flag information when capturing our $pageview event.

To do this, we add the $feature/my-cool-experiment key to our event properties:

routes/web.php
// rest of your code


Route::get('/', function () {


    // rest of your code


    PostHog::capture([
        'distinctId' => $distinctId,
        'event' => '$pageview',
        'properties' => [
            '$feature/my-cool-experiment' => $enabledVariant
        ]
    ]);


    return view('welcome', ['paragraphText' => $paragraphText]);
});

Now PostHog is able to calculate our goal metric for our experiment results.

Experiment results in PostHog

Further reading