CascadiaJS Discord Mirror

A web component for displaying current activity within a channel in a chat application like Discord or Slack.

About

This component reads chat messages that are stored within a Firebase Realtime Database and displays them within a website. It's useful for building immersive audience experience during web based events.

This repository only handles the display of messages that are already loaded to a Realtime Database. For an example of how to load messages from Discord into Firebase, see our Abbot based Discord Bot.

Getting Started

Installing

npm install @cascadiajs/discord-mirror

Firebase

This component fetches data from a Firebase Realtime Database. Data within your database should be within a messages collection in the following format:

export interface Message {
  /* The datetime the message was sent */
  created: string;
  /* The content of the message */
  text: string;
  /* The users nickname within the channel at the time the message was sent */
  username: string;
  /* Whether the message should be displayed in the component. 
  Useful for remove inappropriate content while preserving data about it being sent  */
  visible: boolean;
  /* Optional - if included in the message the component will display the gif instead of the message text */
  gif?: {
    /* The url of a preview image. Used to display for users who enable reduced motion on their machines */
    preview: string;
    /* The url of the animated gif */
    gifUrl: string;
    /* The alt text of the gif */
    alt: string;
  };
}

This isn't to say you can't add additional data to what's being stored, but these are the only values that this component currently interacts with.

Additionally, the component needs the url of the database to connect to. This can be supplied via the url prop

<discord-mirror id="discord-mirror" url="<your database url>"></discord-mirror>

or by setting the value directly on the component object

const mirror = document.getElementById('discord-mirror');
mirror.url = '<your database url>';

Authentication

It's a best practice to secure your database via authentication. This component supports anonymous auth with Firebase. To enable it first update the rule for the database so that it requires authentication to read data.

{
  "rules": {
    ".read": "auth.uid != null"
  }
}

Then pass your Web API Key from your Firebase project settings to the token prop.

<discord-mirror id="discord-mirror" url="<your database url>" token="<your web api key>"></discord-mirror>

Like with url you can also set this value directly.

const mirror = document.getElementById('discord-mirror');
mirror.token = '<your web api key>';

Note: per Firebase documentation, it's totally fine to use the Web API Key in a public setting. This only identifies your Firebase app and doesn't grant any additional permissions.

Putting it all together

Once your Firebase realtime Database is setup and ready to be read, you can connect this component to it.

There are two strategies we recommend for using this component.

Script tag

• Put a script tag similar to this in the head of your index.html

<script type="module" src="https://unpkg.com/@cascadiajs/discord-mirror/dist/discord-mirror/discord-mirror.esm.js"></script>

• Then you can use the element anywhere in your template, JSX, html etc

Node Modules

• Run npm install my-component --save
• Put a script tag similar to this <script src='node_modules/my-component/dist/my-component.esm.js'></script> in the head of your index.html
• Then you can use the element anywhere in your template, JSX, html etc

After you have setup the script tag, add the component to your template, JSX, html, etc...

<discord-mirror id="discord" url="<your url>" token="<your token>"></discord-mirror>

View an demo setup here.

Styles

Disabling styles

The component comes packaged with a set of default styles, but you have the option to disable all aesthetic styles. Simply add a use-styles="false" attribute to the component.

<discord-mirror url="<your db url>" use-styles="false"></discord-mirror>

If you disable styles you will have to style the messages yourself. Messages use the following classes:

• .message: this is the container for each message
• .username: this is the username element
• .message-body: the body of a message, regardless of the content
• .message-text: this contains the content of the message and can be variable based on whether the message is just text or markdown.
• .message-gif: this is the gif content of the message

Shadow DOM

Additionally, this component uses the Shadow DOM to help encapsulate styling of the component. If you are unfamiliar with styling with the Shadow DOM here are a few helpful links

• Stencil Documentation
• https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/web-components/shadowdom#stylefromoutside

We also expose css shadow parts for the above classes and additionally an image part that lets you style all images and gifs.

/* in your consuming app's css */
discord-mirror::part(message) {
  border: 1px solid red;
}

discord-mirror::part(username) {
  border: 1px solid gray;
  padding: 2px;
}

discord-mirror::part(message-body) {
  border: 2px solid blue;
}

discord-mirror::part(message-text) {
  color: red;
}

discord-mirror::part(image) {
  border: 2px solid green;
  width: 400px;
  height: auto;
  padding: 2px;
}

discord-mirror::part(message-gif) {
  border: 2px solid yellow;
  width: 200px;
  height: auto;
  padding: 2px;
}

HighlightJS

We use Highlight.js to add syntax highlighting to messages. By default we apply the atom-one-dark theme. You can override this with the highlight-theme property.

<discord-mirror url="<your db url>" highlight-theme="ascetic"></discord-mirror>

Contributing

The CascadiaJS code of conduct applies to all particpants contributing to this repository.

Commits

Please keep commit messages formatted in the conventional commit standard. We use commit messages to determine the release and generate changelog via semantic release. For ease of use this repo is setup to work with https://commitizen.github.io/cz-cli/. Run npx cz or npm run commit to invoke commitizen and have it walk you though building the commit message. Below are example of commit messages and the release types they will create.

For convienience, this repo is setup with commitizen to help format your commit messages. To use it, run npx cz or git cz if you have it installed locally already.

Stencil

Stencil is a compiler for building fast web apps using Web Components.

Stencil combines the best concepts of the most popular frontend frameworks into a compile-time rather than run-time tool. Stencil takes TypeScript, JSX, a tiny virtual DOM layer, efficient one-way data binding, an asynchronous rendering pipeline (similar to React Fiber), and lazy-loading out of the box, and generates 100% standards-based Web Components that run in any browser supporting the Custom Elements v1 spec.

Stencil components are just Web Components, so they work in any major framework or with no framework at all. To start building a new web component using Stencil, clone this repo to a new directory:

git clone https://github.com/ionic-team/stencil-component-starter.git my-component
cd my-component
git remote rm origin

and run:

npm install
npm start

To build the component for production, run:

npm run build

To run the unit tests for the components, run:

npm test

Need help? Check out Stencil docs here.