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Besedka

Besedka is a free (as in beer), open source, self-hosted commenting system for your website. It is distributed as a single executable binary, which you can download and run on your own server.

Features

  • Portable, small, fast
  • Free, open, no ads, no tracking, no bullshit
  • Markdown with preview
  • Moderation
  • No social logins, No user registration, confirmation emails, etc.
  • Integrate your existing users or allow anonymous commenting
  • Multiple sites
  • Use your own CSS or pick a theme

⚡️ Quickstart

Download and extract the latest build from the releases page on GitHub for your architecture and make sure the binary is executable. Next, add your site (use besedka sites add -h to see all available options):

$ besedka sites add my.blog.com --private false --anonymous true

Run the server:

$ besedka server

On your website(s) include the following script tag:

<script type="text/javascript" src="https://your-besedka-server.com/comments.js" defer></script>

where https://your-besedka-server.com is the domain pointing to the server which runs Besedka. Finally put this div where you want your comments to appear:

<div id="besedka" data-api="https://your-besedka-server.com"></div>

That's it!

🎨 Styling

Besedka comes with an opt-in customisable default theme. To include it, use the following link tag:

<link href="https://your-besedka-server.com/themes/default.css" rel="stylesheet" />

The default theme is a good start to build on if you like the typical comment widget UX.

More theme contributions are welcome!

Single Page Apps (React or other fancy js frameworks)

Including the besedka script will build an instance of besedka and bind it to window.__besedka. It also attaches an event to DOMContentLoaded which calls window.__besedka.run().

If your app changes browser URLs without reloading the page (e.g. SPAs), you might need to call window.__besedka.run() manually at the appropriate time, for example on the window's popstate. Here's how to do it if you are using Rails' Hotwire

document.addEventListener('turbo:load', () => {
  window.__besedka.run()
})

Multiple site configuration

Besedka requires that you have explicitly added a site config, otherwise it will not load any comments or allow posting of comments. To manage your sites, use the sites command:

$ besedka sites --help

Please keep the secrets for your sites private and don't display them anywhere. You will be using those to sign the user object when embedding Besedka on your website. If you accidentally leak a secret to your front-end, then anyone can send whatever user info they want and cause mayhem! If this happens, you need to immediately delete the affected config:

$ besedka sites remove blog.mysite.com

This will only remove the site config. Comments will remain intact

Adding moderators

A moderator can either be set with a signed user object, or one can be added from the CLI:

$ besedka moderators add "Brian Kernighan" l3g3nd4ry_h4x0r

Overriding the site config and the page for which comments are loaded

By default the comment widget will request the config associated with the current hostname. You can explicitly require a different site and page by providing a config <script> tag:

<script type="application/json" id="besedka-config">
{
  "site": "my-other-blog.example.com",
  "path": "/canonical/path/to/this/page.html"
}
</script>
  • site - This is useful when you want to load a configuration for a different site or to share the same comments between different domains.
  • path - Overwrite the page to which comments are linked. Set this to the canonical path in case your page contains dynamic parts in the URL, e.g. /blog/page/2

Note that these configuration values can be set by anyone.

Signing in your existing users

If you have disabled anonymous commenting in your configuration, you will need a way to allow your users to comment. This is done by providing a user object in a script tag similar to the configuration one:

<script type="application/json" id="besedka-user" data-signature="ZM5uFayLvBydsRmnlxcvhaLKCHmUy7rkQH4JavmN0bY=">
{
  "name": "John Doe",
  "moderator": true,
  "op": true,
  "avatar": "https://mysite.com/avatars/johndoe.png"
}
</script>

To ensure the configuration isn't tampered with by a user on the front-end, you must include a data-signature attribute which contains the signed user object with the unique secret for the site. Without this signature, or with an invalid one, the user info will be ignored and an error message will be displayed instead of the commenting widget.

IMPORTANT: You have to keep this secret private on your server. Don't show it anywhere in your pages, otherwise anyone can sign a user object, make themselves a moderator, and wipe all your comments. Signing the user object MUST happen on your back-end.

OK, now that you have been warned, let's sign the message. First, grab the secret from the config:

$ besedka sites get my.blog.com

You should see the base64 encoded secret. To get the signature of a user object, you have to obtain a SHA256 HMAC digest and then base64 encode it. Here's how you would do that in Ruby:

require "openssl"
require "base64"
require "json"

user = {
  name: "Jon Doe",
  moderator: true
}

secret = "BGjrlspsXqte4PMXy87wNE942gLh3pT1f+J55SE2f6U="
secret_bytes = Base64.strict_decode64(secret)
digest = OpenSSL::Digest.new('sha256')
signature = Base64.strict_encode64(OpenSSL::HMAC.digest(digest, secret_bytes, user.to_json))

puts signature

Note that Besedka compares the signature against the raw text value inside the <script type="application/json" id="besedka-user"></script>, so whatever appears in the tag, please ensure you sign the exact same value on your backend. Signing this:

{
  "name": "Dennis Ritchie",
  "moderator": true
}

results in a different signature than this:

{"name":"Dennis Ritchie","moderator":true}

All user keys are optional except when the site configuration doesn't allow anonymous posting. In such case, you must pass a signed user with at least a name key that is not empty. The avatar key should be any valid src value for an <img /> tag, although I recommend against using a data:image attribute because this is saved with each comment record and it will result in a larger size of the database file.

Compiling from source

Make sure you have NodeJS and the Rust toolchain installed on your machine. Once you clone the repo, navigate to the frontend dir and install all node dependencies:

$ npm install

Next, create a dummy database and point DATABASE_URL env var to it from an .env file:

$ touch besedka.sqlite && echo "DATABASE_URL=sqlite://besedka.sqlite" > .env

This is needed because besedka uses compile-time query checking for some of the database queries. Once done, migrate the database:

$ cargo install sqlx-cli && sqlx migrate run

You can now run the release script from the project root:

$ ./release

This will compile the front end, move the asset files to frontend/dist, compile the binary, and move it to releases/besedka-{version}-{target-triple}.tar.gz. If you simply want the executable, just look at what the release script does - it is very simple and should be self-explanatory.