talk

Online comments are broken. Our open-source commenting platform, Talk, rethinks how moderation, comment display, and conversation function, creating the opportunity for safer, smarter discussions around your work. Read more about Talk here.

Built with <3 by The Coral Project, a part of Vox Media.

Preview Talk easily by running Talk via a Heroku App:

Table of Contents

• Requirements
• Running
  • Docker
  • Source
  • Development
    • Email
    • Design Language System (UI Components)
• Configuration
• License

Requirements

• MongoDB >=3.6
• Redis >=3.2
• NodeJS >=10
• NPM >=6.7

Running

You can install Talk using Docker or via Source. We recommend Docker, as it provides the easiest deployment solution going forward, as all the dependencies are baked and shipped with the provided coralproject/talk:next image. When v5 releases to master, you'll be able to select it using coralproject/talk:5.

Docker

The easiest way to get started with Talk is through our published Docker image and provided example docker-compose.yml file. The following assumes that you have Docker and Docker Compose installed on your local machine:

• Install Docker: https://docs.docker.com/install/
• Install Docker Compose: https://docs.docker.com/compose/install/ (this is typically included in the Docker Desktop editions already)

# Create directories to persist the data in MongoDB and Redis.
mkdir -p data/{mongo,redis}

# Create the `docker-compose.yml` file to get started.
cat > docker-compose.yml <<EOF
version: "2"
services:
  talk:
    image: coralproject/talk:next
    restart: always
    ports:
      - "127.0.0.1:3000:5000"
    depends_on:
      - mongo
      - redis
    environment:
      - MONGODB_URI=mongodb://mongo:27017/talk
      - REDIS_URI=redis://redis:6379
      - SIGNING_SECRET=<replace me with something secret>
  mongo:
    image: mongo:3.6
    volumes:
      - ./data/mongo:/data/db
  redis:
    image: redis:3.2
    volumes:
      - ./data/redis:/data
EOF

# Start up Talk using Docker.
docker-compose up -d

Then head on over to http://localhost:3000 to install Talk!

Source

Talk requires NodeJS >=10, we recommend using nvm to help manage node versions: https://github.com/creationix/nvm.

# Clone and cd into the Talk directory.
git clone https://github.com/coralproject/talk.git
cd talk

# Install dependencies.
npm install

# Build the application dependencies.
# This might take a while.
npm run build

This should output all the compiled application code to ./dist.

Running Talk with default settings assumes that you have:

• MongoDB >=3.6 running on 127.0.0.1:27017
• Redis >=3.2 running on 127.0.0.1:6379

If you don't already have these databases running, you can execute the following assuming you have Docker installed on your local machine:

docker run -d -p 27017:27017 --restart always --name mongo mongo:3.6
docker run -d -p 6379:6379 --restart always --name redis redis:3.2

Then start Talk with:

# Start the server in production mode.
npm run start

Then head on over to http://localhost:3000 to install Talk!

Development

Running Talk for development is very similar to installing Talk via Source as described above.

Talk requires NodeJS >=10, we recommend using nvm to help manage node versions: https://github.com/creationix/nvm.

# Clone and cd into the Talk directory.
git clone https://github.com/coralproject/talk.git
cd talk

# Install dependencies.
npm install

Running Talk with default settings assumes that you have:

• MongoDB >=3.6 running on 127.0.0.1:27017
• Redis >=3.2 running on 127.0.0.1:6379

If you don't already have these databases running, you can execute the following assuming you have Docker installed on your local machine:

docker run -d -p 27017:27017 --restart always --name mongo mongo:3.6
docker run -d -p 6379:6379 --restart always --name redis redis:3.2

Then start Talk with:

# Run the server in development mode in order to facilitate auto-restarting and
# rebuilding when file changes are detected. This might take a while to fully run.
npm run watch

When the client code has been built, navigate to http://localhost:8080/install to start the installation wizard. Note: Ensure localhost:8080 is used in the permitted domains list.

To see the comment stream goto http://localhost:8080/.

To run linting and tests use the following commands:

# Run the linters.
npm run lint

# Run our unit and integration tests.
npm run test

Email

To test out the email sending functionality, you can run inbucket which provides a test SMTP server that can visualize emails in the browser:

docker run -d --name inbucket -p 2500:2500 -p 9000:9000 inbucket/inbucket

You can then configure the email server on Talk by updating the Tenant with:

{
  // ...
  "email": {
    "enabled": true,
    "smtpURI": "smtp://localhost:2500",
    "fromAddress": "[email protected]"
  },
  // ...
}

Restarting Talk will be needed. Navigate to http://localhost:9000, click the "Monitor" tab. New emails received on this screen.

Design Language System (UI Components)

We use docz to document and develop our Design Language System. To start docz run:

# Make sure CSS types are generated.
# This is not required when `npm run watch` is already running.
npm run generate:css-types

# Run docz in development.
npm run docz -- dev

After compilation has finished you can access docz at http://localhost:3030/.

Configuration

The following environment variables can be set to configure the Talk Server. You can expose them in your shell via export NODE_ENV=development or by placing the variables in a .env file in the root of the project in a simple NODE_ENV=development format delimited by newlines.

• NODE_ENV - Can be one of production or development. All production deployments should use production. Defaults to production when ran with npm run start and development when run with npm run start:development.
• PORT - The port to listen for HTTP and Websocket requests. (Default 3000)
• MONGODB_URI - The MongoDB database URI to connect to. (Default mongodb://127.0.0.1:27017/talk)
• REDIS_URI - The Redis database URI to connect to. (Default redis://127.0.0.1:6379)
• SIGNING_SECRET - The shared secret to use to sign JSON Web Tokens (JWT) with the selected signing algorithm. 🚨 Don't forget to set this variable! 🚨 (Default: keyboard cat)
• SIGNING_ALGORITHM - The signing algorithm to use for signing JWT's. (Default HS256).
• LOGGING_LEVEL - The logging level that can be set to one of fatal, error, warn, info, debug, or trace. (Default info)
• STATIC_URI - The URI that static assets can be accessed from. This URI can be to a proxy that uses this Talk server on PORT as the upstream. Disabled by default.
• DISABLE_TENANT_CACHING - When true, all tenants will be loaded from the database when needed rather than keeping a in-memory copy in sync via published events on Redis. (Default false)
• DISABLE_MONGODB_AUTOINDEXING - When true, Talk will not perform indexing operations when it starts up. This can be desired when you've already installed Talk on the target MongoDB, but want to improve start performance. (Default false)
• LOCALE - Specify the default locale to use for all requests without a locale specified. (Default en-US)
• ENABLE_GRAPHIQL - When true, it will enable the /graphiql even in production, use with care. (Default false)
• CONCURRENCY - The number of worker nodes to spawn to handle web traffic, this should be tied to the number of CPU's available. (Default os.cpus().length)
• DEV_PORT - The port where the Webpack Development server is running on. (Default 8080)
• METRICS_USERNAME - The username for Basic Authentication at the /metrics and /cluster_metrics endpoint.
• METRICS_PASSWORD - The password for Basic Authentication at the /metrics and /cluster_metrics endpoint.
• CLUSTER_METRICS_PORT - If CONCURRENCY is more than 1, the metrics are provided at this port under /cluster_metrics. (Default 3001)

License

Talk is released under the Apache License, v2.0.