DEPRECATION NOTICE: Snowplow CDN for JS Assets **COMPLETE**

For engineers
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The Snowplow CDN for JavaScript Assets will be deprecated on 1st March 2021. All assets loaded from https://d1fc8wv8zag5ca.cloudfront.net/ will begin redirecting on that date. If you are using assets from the Snowplow CDN, this means your Snowplow tracking may stop working unless you take action. In the future we will fully decommision the Snowplow CDN for JavaScript Assets.

UPDATE
We have moved the deprecation date to the 1st March 2021. On that date we will begin returning 301 redirects to the jsDelivr CDN to ease the transition period. This may still cause tracking to fail depending on your web site configuration - please read the replies below for more information.

Snowplow Insights Customers: This may also impact you so please do read below, however the Snowplow Customer Success team will also be in touch with you next week with more details.

As an alternative we have made all of our assets available on the jsDelivr CDN. You can read more about the impressive jsDelivr network here. More information on how to migrate to jsDelivr is available below.

Beginning on 1st March 2021 we plan to automatically redirect requests for the Snowplow JavaScript Tracker to the jsDelivr CDN. This may impact your tracking depending on your website configuration (e.g. you have a strict Content-Security-Policy (CSP)). If you’re concerned about the impact of a redirect on your implementation we highly recommend making the switch before this date.

Please read below for all alternative options, including using jsDelivr CDN.

1. Hosting sp.js

Whilst we’re offering an alternative CDN, Snowplow does not recommend using third party providers for hosting JavaScript assets that you use on your websites. We encourage all users to host sp.js on their own servers, and this will always be the recommended best practice.

If you wish to follow our recommended best practices, please follow our guides for hosting sp.js on AWS or GCP.

In the past, Snowplow users have had access to a Snowplow hosted CDN for JavaScript assets. We announced in September 2019 that we will stop updating this for new JavaScript tracker releases from v2.10.2. We made this change as we wanted Snowplow users to control the location of where their JS assets are being loaded from, this is deemed best practice as it gives you full control over the JavaScript that is executing on your website, removing any potential security risk. However, this has posed a hurdle for many, making trying out Snowplow and testing new versions harder as you needed to find somewhere to host sp.js.

2. New third-party CDN option

We’ve now made all our Snowplow JavaScript assets available via the jsdelivr.com CDN. Click the link below to explore the available assets:

All versions of sp.js have been made available on jsdelivr.com and it’s extremely easy to migrate.

How to migrate

If you are currently using: https://d1fc8wv8zag5ca.cloudfront.net/2.10.2/sp.js
you will need to switch to: https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/snowplow/sp-js-assets@2.10.2/sp.js

The latest version (2.16.1) is also available: https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/snowplow/sp-js-assets@2.16.1/sp.js

If you are using the Snowplow GA plugin, please consider hosting sp-ga-plugin yourself, or you can update to: https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/snowplow/sp-js-assets/sp-ga-plugin/0.1.0/sp-ga-plugin.js

Be notified of future changes

Going forwards we would like to continue proactively informing open source users who opt in about relevant changes to Snowplow technology and the way we host it. If you would like to receive these notices please log your email address here.

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The Snowplow JavaScript Tracker, sp.js, is now also available via cdnjs as an alternative to jsDelivr, if you wish to use a third party CDN.

You’ll find information and version availability here: https://cdnjs.com/libraries/snowplow

The latest release (2.16.1) is available here: https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/snowplow/2.16.1/sp.js

Additionally the Snowplow GA plug-in is also available: https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/snowplow-ga-plugin/0.1.0/sp-ga-plugin.js

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I bet a whole lot of people are going to be caught out with this.

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We’re doing everything we can to reach out to companies who are using this, in particular by inspecting the Top Referrers to the CDN and using our various communication lists.

We will continue evaluating as we get nearer to January, we certainly don’t want peoples Snowplow implementation to suddenly stop working.

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We’ve made a decision to not redirect the assets automatically to jsDeliver today as we do not want to cause any unintended impact to our open source users in the run up to Christmas.

We still intend to decommision the CDN on the 31st January 2021 . You must move to jsDelivr or cdnjs by this date for your Snowplow tracking to continue working.

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We are continuing to work with the Open Source community to move as much traffic away from the CDN as possible before the deprecation date however this is proving challenging and during Q4 2020 we actually saw increasing levels of traffic hitting the CDN.

With this in mind, we have decided to move the deprecation of the CDN to 1st March 2021.

On the 1st March 2021, all requests will begin to redirect (by returning a 301 status code) to the jsDelivr CDN. This should ease the transition and reduce the impact of deprecating the CDN.

However this may still impact your tracking depending on your website configuration (e.g. you have a strict Content-Security-Policy (CSP)). If you’re concerned about the impact of a redirect on your implementation we highly recommend making the switch before this date.

We will fully decomission the CDN in the future but will monitor this change first before commiting to a decommisioning date. We will give at least 3 months notice before fully decommisioning the CDN.

Be notified of future changes

Going forwards we would like to continue proactively informing open source users who opt in about relevant changes to Snowplow technology and the way we host it. If you would like to receive these notices please log your email address here.

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We are now redirecting requests from the Snowplow CDN to jsDelivr.

We will leave the CDN redirecting for the forseeable future, should we decide to completely switch off the CDN then we will give at least 3 months notice.

As we mentioned in the original post, our advice is to either host (and rename) sp.js yourself so you don’t rely on 3rd party CDNs or migrate to use jsDelivr or cdnjs directly (so you don’t have the redirect hop when loading the tracker).

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