Easy setup for A/B Testing with nginx, Clojure + Compojure

Actually, I figured out the following directions for my Clojure + Compojure web apps, but as long as you are using nginx, this would work for Node.js, Rails, Sinatra, etc.

The first thing you need to do is to make two copies of whatever web app you want to perform A/B Testing on, and get two Google Analytics user account tokens _uacct (i.e., the string beginning with “UA-”) tokens, one for each version. I usually use Hiccup, but for adding the Google Analytics Javascript code, I just add it as a string to the common layout file header like (reformatted to fit this page width by adding line breaks): 
(html5
    [:head [:title "..."]
     ""
     (include-css "/css/bootstrap.css")
     (include-css "/css/mark.css")
     (include-css "/css/bootstrap-responsive.css")
     ""
     ""
     ]
The next step is to configure nginx to split requests (hopefully equally!) between both instances of you web app. In the following example, I am assuming that I am running the A test on port 6070 and the B test on port 6072. I modified my nginx.conf file to look like: 
upstream backend {
    ip_hash;
    server   127.0.0.1:6070;
    server   127.0.0.1:6072;
  }

  server {
     listen 80;
     server_name  DOMAINNAME.com www.DOMAINNAME.com;
     location / {
        proxy_redirect off;
        proxy_set_header Host $host;
        proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
        proxy_pass http://backend;
    }
    error_page 500 502 503 504  /error.html;
    location = /error.html {
        root  /etc/nginx;
    }
  }
The ip_hash directive is supposed to evenly split requests by requesting IP address. This means that if a user hits your web app from their home and then again at their local coffee shop that the might see both A and B versions of your web app. Other options would be to use a per user device cookie, etc., but I think that randomly assigning version A or B based on a hash of the requesting IP address is sufficient for my needs.

I am just starting to use this scheme for A/B Testing, but it seems to work as expected. I do suggest that when your clone you web app that you keep versions A and B identical for a few days and check the Google Analytics for both account tokens to make sure the statistics for page views, times on pages, etc. are close to being the same for A and B.

After more testing, Google Analytics shows that the nginx ip_hash directive seems to split traffic near perfectly 50% to each A and B versions of my web site.

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