How to not send data to GA when debugging locally? - google-analytics

Question

As the documentation says:
There is a debugging version of Google Analytics that will print extra info to the console for debugging purpouses. However, this version will send data to GA even when it is only for debugging.
According to this documentation (that is a bit outdated), we need to add this code to our Google Analytics code to avoid sending hits to GA:
if (location.hostname == 'localhost') {
ga('set', 'sendHitTask', null);
}
However, I'm using a newer version of GA that uses gtag in the tracking code, So I've change the ga function to gtag:
<!-- Global site tag (gtag.js) - Google Analytics -->
<script async src="https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtag/js?id=UA-134628373-1"></script>
<script>
window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || [];
function gtag(){dataLayer.push(arguments);}
gtag('js', new Date());
gtag('config', 'UA-134628373-1');
if (location.hostname == 'localhost') {
gtag('set', 'sendHitTask', null);
}
</script>
Just for clarification:
if (location.hostname == 'localhost') {
ga('set', 'sendHitTask', null);
}
to:
if (location.hostname == 'localhost') {
gtag('set', 'sendHitTask', null);
}
Is this the correct approache? I don't want to mess my data.
I'm using GTM to deploy the GA code. In order to make the changes to the GA tracking code, I've used a Custom HTML Tag.

Answer 1

There is a slightly different implementation for gtag. You can set the following window property to true in the conditional statement:
window['ga-disable-GA_MEASUREMENT_ID'] = true;
Replace GA_MEASUREMENT_ID with the Analytics ID of the property that you would like to disable.
This window property must be set before any calls to gtag() are made, and it must be set on each page for which you want to disable Analytics. If the property is not set or set to false, then Analytics will work as usual.
More info in link below. Hope it helps.
gtag ga-diasble setting