Uncomment is a self-hosted comment system for blogs and static sites written in Rust and TypeScript.

Features

• Lightweight
• Nested comments
• Markdown
• Moderation
• SQLite or PostgreSQL
• Import from Disqus

Todo

• Optional user authentication
• Optional third party authentication
• Notifications (push? email?)
• Rule system for automatic moderation
• Akismet (maybe)

Usage

Use docker to pull the latest stable version of Uncomment for use with an SQLite database:

docker pull nielssp/uncomment:sqlite

Create a new envioronment file with at least the following settings:

UNCOMMENT_HOST=https://your-website.com,https://uncomment.your-website.com
UNCOMMENT_SECRET_KEY=<secret key used (along with a random salt) for hashing password>
UNCOMMENT_DEFAULT_ADMIN_USERNAME=admin
UNCOMMENT_DEFAULT_ADMIN_PASSWORD=<password for first login>

You can generate a random secret key with openssl rand -base64 20.

Launch the Uncomment server:

docker run --rm --name uncomment -p 8080:8080 --env-file <your-env-file> -v <path-to-db-dir>:/db nielssp/uncomment:sqlite

Add the following to your website:

<div id="comments"></div>
<script data-uncomment
    data-uncomment-target="#comments"
    src="https://uncomment.your-website.com/en-GB/embed.js"></script>

PostgreSQL

To use PostgreSQL, pull the postgres tag instead:

docker pull nielssp/uncomment:postgres

Add a connection string to the environment file:

UNCOMMENT_DATABASE=postgresql://username:password@hostname:port/dbname

When using a local PostgreSQL database it may make sense to add --network=host to the docker run command.

Reverse proxy with nginx and letsencrypt

TODO: step by step

server {
  listen 443;
  server_name uncomment.your-website.com;

  location / {
    proxy_pass http://localhost:8080;
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
    proxy_set_header Host $host;
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
  }

  ssl on;
  # Certbot managed lines here
}

Server Configuration

Uncomment is configured via environment variables, you can put these in an environment file and pass them to docker via the --env-file argument.

• UNCOMMENT_LISTEN=127.0.0.1:5000 – hostname and port to listen to
• UNCOMMENT_HOST – comma-separated list of websites that will be accessing Uncomment
• UNCOMMENT_FORWARDED – set to true if Uncomment is accessed via a proxy (e.g. nginx proxy_pass) in which case the Forwarded/X-Forwarded-For headers are used to determine users' IP addresses
• UNCOMMENT_DATABASE=sqlite:data.db – database connection string
• UNCOMMENT_SECRET_KEY – secret key used as part of Argon2 hash used for password hashing
• UNCOMMENT_ARGON2_ITERATIONS=192 – number of Argon2 iterations to use, more iterations means more secure hash but slower login
• UNCOMMENT_ARGON2_MEMORY_SIZE=4096
• UNCOMMENT_RATE_LIMIT=10 – maximum number of comments allowed from a single IP address within the time period specified by UNCOMMENT_RATE_LIMIT_INTERVAL
• UNCOMMENT_RATE_LIMIT_INTERVAL=10 – minutes
• UNCOMMENT_AUTO_THREADS=true – automatically create threads. If disabled you must manually create threads in the dashboard.
• UNCOMMENT_THREAD_URL – thread URL used to validate new threads, use %name% as the thread name placeholder, e.g. UNCOMMENT_THREAD_URL=https://myblog.com/blog/%name%
• UNCOMMENT_REQUIRE_NAME=false – whether a name is required for posting comments, client should be configured to match
• UNCOMMENT_REQUIRE_EMAIL=false – whether an email is required for posting comments, client should be configured to match
• UNCOMMENT_MODERATE_ALL=false – whether all new comments should be marked as pending
• UNCOMMENT_MAX_DEPTH=6 – maximum level of nesting allowed, cannot be higher than 6. 0 means that the comment list is completely flat and all replies are added to the end of the list.
• UNCOMMENT_DEFAULT_ADMIN_USERNAME – default username of admin user created automatically when no admin users exist
• UNCOMMENT_DEFAULT_ADMIN_PASSWORD – default password of admin user created automatically when no admin users exist

Client Configuration

The client is configured via data-attributes added to the script tag used for embedding comments:

<div id="comments"></div>
<script data-uncomment
    data-uncomment-target="#comments"
    data-uncomment-require-name="true"
    data-uncomment-relative-dates="true"
    src="https://uncomment.your-website.com/en-GB/embed.js"></script>

The script tag must be marked with the data-uncomment attribute. By default the host-part of the src attribute is used as the base path for all API requests to the Uncomment backend, but this can be overridden using the data-uncomment-host attribute. So if you're serving the Uncomment script from https://cdn.your-site.com/embed.js with Uncomment running on https://uncomment.your-site.com you can use the following configuration:

<script data-uncomment
    data-uncomment-host="https://uncomment.your-site.com"
    data-uncomment-target="#comments"
    src="https://cdn.your-site.com/embed.js"></script>

• data-uncomment-target – selector for the container element used to contain the comments
• data-uncomment-id – thread name to use instead of location.pathname
• data-uncomment-host – alternative API base path to use instead of src
• data-uncomment-relative-dates – display relative dates like "4 weeks ago", enabled by default
• data-uncomment-newest-first – whether to display comments sorted chronologically in descending order instead of ascending order
• data-uncomment-require-name – whether a name is required for posting comments, server should be configured to match
• data-uncomment-require-email – whether an email is required for posting comments, server should be configured to match
• data-uncomment-click-to-load – whether to present the user with a button for loading the comments instead of automatically loading them when the page loads

Building from source

First download the source either using git:

git clone https://github.com/nielssp/uncomment.git

Or by downloading an archive from https://github.com/nielssp/uncomment/releases

Client

Requirements:

• node and npm

To build the frontend open a terminal in the source directory and run the following commands:

npm install
npm run build

The bundled client code is placed in the dist directory.

Server

Requirements:

• rust and cargo

To build the server open a terminal in the source directory and run one of the following commands (the first compiles Uncomment with SQLite support, the second compiles Uncomment with PostgreSQL support):

cargo build --release
cargo build --release --features postgres

The executable is placed in the target/release directory. You can run it with:

./target/release/uncomment

The server expects to find the dist directory in the current working directory. See the server configuration section for a list of environment variables that can be used to configure the server.