almost / hubbub

Comments as GitHub pull requests for Jekyll (and other static site generator) websites.

Hubbub

Comments as Github pull requests for Jekyll (and other static site generator) websites.

Thanks to Miles Sabin (twitter & github) for the original idea and initial sponsorship.

Initial development by Thomas Parslow. Pull requests very welcome.

Quick Deployment

You can deploy (for free) to Heroku with the button below:

It will ask you for a Github username and a password. This is for the commenter user which will be the user which actually creates the pull requests for comments. I strongly suggest you create a new user just for this.

Set URL_PREFIX config var to _posts/ and URL_SUFFIX to .markdown for file structure like _posts/2018-12-15-welcome-to-jekyll.markdown.

Manual Deployment

To run the Hubbub server you'll first need to install Node.JS and NPM which you can get nodejs.org.

To install the dependencies required by the Hubbub server run the following command from the project directory:

npm install

You can configure the Hubbub server component by adding a local.json file to the config directory, you can use default.json as a base. You'll need to configure the commenter user (should be a Github user created solely for this purpose) and the target site (you can configure more than one if you want, but you'll usually just want to supply a single default site).

Once you've created the configuration file you can run the server with this command:

PORT=8080 NODE_ENV=local node server.js

Once you've got the server running go to http://127.0.0.1:8080/help to see instructions for integrating Hubbub into your blog (or read the instructions through Github)

Contributing

Pull Requests are very welcome. Check out the Github issues for a list of things that need doing (and please feel free to add your own).

We use Waffle.io to view Github issues, you can too if you want:

hubbub's Issues

Remove all TODO: comments

Either they're still relevant and should be fixed or added as issues or they're no longer relevant

Comment submission fails with "Failed to send comment."

Hello!

website github repo: https://github.com/rootkea/rootkea.github.io
Comment page: https://rootkea.me/jekyll/update/2018/12/15/welcome-to-jekyll

After, submitting comment on the comment page, an alert box pops up with text "Failed to send comment."

Interestingly, the Hubbub comment system was working perfectly a month ago. Not sure what the exact cause is.

Add a setup check page that checks things are working ok

Editing/deleteing comments

Users should be able to edit/delete pending comments. Possibly accepted comments as well (in this case it would create a new pull request).

Failed to save comment: Can't find post file

Hello!

Whenever I try to submit the comment the popup with "Failed to send comment" emerges and server log shows "Failed to save comment: Can't find post file".

I re-deployed the Heroku node multiple times to make sure that I had entered the correct credentials and repo details.

Webpage: https://rootkea.me/jekyll/update/2019/02/05/comments-work-here/
Repo: https://github.com/rootkea/rootkea.github.io
Heroku log:

2019-02-26T15:17:41.358962+00:00 heroku[router]: at=info method=GET path="/hubbub.js" host=hubbub-bot.herokuapp.com request_id=bacb4143-ba23-48d6-a9a6-b9f43ab2977c fwd="58.84.15.181" dyno=web.1 connect=1ms service=3ms status=200 bytes=9427 protocol=https

2019-02-26T15:17:53.225282+00:00 heroku[router]: at=info method=OPTIONS path="/api/default/comments" host=hubbub-bot.herokuapp.com request_id=92d0801d-6385-4339-abec-33a326aa0d24 fwd="58.84.15.181" dyno=web.1 connect=0ms service=1ms status=204 bytes=301 protocol=https

2019-02-26T15:17:53.796484+00:00 heroku[router]: at=info method=POST path="/api/default/comments" host=hubbub-bot.herokuapp.com request_id=aa3e7bfb-f6a7-4ebd-b754-cd3c2bcca3e2 fwd="58.84.15.181" dyno=web.1 connect=0ms service=334ms status=500 bytes=362 protocol=https

2019-02-26T15:17:53.793122+00:00 app[web.1]: Failed to save comment: Can't find post file: _posts/2019-02-05-comments-work-here.markdown

Add to NPM

Make it easy to install via NPM

Tests for the code in server.js

Root server.js doesn't have tests right now.

Client side code

The client side code needs to allow:

• Adding comments
• Seeing pending comments that you have made
• data- attribute integration option
• Manual JS integration option

Configuration should be changable via the command line

To make it easier to load different configs when needed.

Web based config

It would be nice to be able to configure the system via a web interface instead of via the config.json file

Stop CSRF comments

It shouldn't be possible for javascript running on a random domain to add comments. The endpoint should probably check the referer. Might be an issue if the target site is HTTPS.

How does Waffle.IO do there badge pull requests

They don't appear to come from any repo. Maybe they make the repo, make the PR then delete the repo?

Could be a way around the issues with keeping the forks up to date?

Add copyrights and license

Make comment previews persist in localStorage

Mention installing node in README

Make the transform from post path to github path configurable

Right now it's totally hardcoded for a normal Jekyll site.

Editing comments

We now support deleting pending comments (see #4), editing wouldn't be too much harder

Support for Gitlab

Hello!

I use self hosted Gitlab instance as a version control. Is it possible to use Gitlab instead of Github?

Thanks!

Allow admin to select Markdown, Text, GFM or whatever for comments

Spam filtering

Akismet? Something like that?

Simpler spam countermeasures?

Automatically create fork onto comments user if it doesn't exist

The comments user needs a fork of the site being commented on, right now you have to make this manually but it would be better if it happened automatically.

Make the location of post files in the repository configurable

Right now it assumes the Jekyll defaults (all posts in /_posts with a .markdown extension) but of course this isn't required at all by Jekyll or other static site generators.

See urlPathToSourceFile in server.js: https://github.com/almost/hubbub/blob/master/server.js#L50

Additionally the error message is awful when the paths don't match, gives no information whatsoever. It should produce a useful error message with troubleshooting help.

Request and error logging

It would be nice to have the server log everything in a consistent format

Add all pending comments to the same PR

From Miles:

I think it might be better to adopt an optimistic strategy and assume
it's more likely than not that a comment will be merged. In that case,
rather than having a separate PR for each comment we just add commits
to a current PR which can be merged in one go without conflicts (much
as I've accidentally done with my PR to almost/hubbub). Obviously this
makes it a little more work to remove undesirable comments which are
mixed in with acceptable ones, but I think I'd like to see if that's
less of a burden ... right now it seems much too easy to generate
conflicts with the one PR per comment model.

Improve readme with examples and documentation of configuration options

Should be friendly and welcoming to new users

Submitting comment redirects to the help page

Hello!

website github repo: https://github.com/rootkea/rootkea.github.io
Comment page: https://rootkea.me/jekyll/update/2018/12/15/welcome-to-jekyll

After, submitting comment on the comment page, it gets redirected to https://hubbub-bot.herokuapp.com/help

Heroku Application log:

2019-02-09T06:29:13.724253+00:00 heroku[router]: at=info method=GET path="/api/default/comments?metadata_name=foo&comment=Hello%21" host=hubbub-bot.herokuapp.com request_id=4c86579e-0793-4592-86ad-2b0cdf664d3c fwd="58.84.15.142" dyno=web.1 connect=0ms service=79ms status=302 bytes=290 protocol=https

2019-02-09T06:29:13.983453+00:00 heroku[router]: at=info method=GET path="/help" host=hubbub-bot.herokuapp.com request_id=8a9d3559-be87-49b4-9b9d-c3b73062ae70 fwd="58.84.15.142" dyno=web.1 connect=0ms service=13ms status=200 bytes=2378 protocol=https

Interestingly, the Hubbub comment system was working perfectly a month ago. May be Github changed their API? Sorry, not good at js so can't seem to find the exact cause.

OAuth for github

Probably as part of #5 it would be nice to be able to OAuth with github. Right now the system can use OAuth tokens but the user is left to generate them on their own.

Example Jekyll Integration with side by side markdown preview

Example of using the system with Jekyll

Post install setup help (especially for after Deploy to Heroku deployment)

Github client editFile method should handle concurrent changes

If the file changes while it's being edited the editFile should just try again

Optimistically add pending comments to the page before they've been verified

We store pending comments in localStorage then on page load we check with the server to make sure they're still pending. We only display them once the server has replied. Might be nicer to add them to the page right away then remove them if the server replies that they're gone.

Deploy to heroku button

It should be as simple as possible to deploy your own instance of the system using something like Heroku. Work work nicely along with #5.

Non-javascript fallback

Should be ok to just post directly to the comments endpoint and have it return an "ok your comment will be reviewed soon" page.

Make unique id for each comment available in comment template

Demo site

Hello!

I am looking for a commenting solution for my static website. Is there any existing site or demo site which uses HubBub?

How does HubBub work? Is it similar to StaticMan? (StaticMan commits the submitted comments to the website source repo)

Thanks!

Automatically reduce merge issues

I have a plan for reducing merge issues when multiple comments come in at the same time. We'll maintain a load of blank lines where the comments are to be inserted. The server will check for existing comment pull requests and will insert each new comment on a different blank line.

Update the comment fork without using Pull Requests

See the answer on SO here: http://stackoverflow.com/a/27762278/65130

We're currently doing number 3 but number 1 would be way better and probably much more reliable.

Add time and date to comments

Add an index page for the server

Maybe links to the setup check and help pages?

Password auth deprecating soon

Link to GitHub Post

---

GitHub will soon need you to use a personal access token.