@/banta

⚠ Beta | 🌐 Website | 📦 NPM

Banta is an effort to create an open, extensible system for chatting/comments on the web.

Real-time: Live-updating comments & chat widgets
- Both the Banta Comments and Banta Chat widgets are fully live updated via WebSockets.
- When running in an environment where WebSockets are not appropriate, a REST call is used to fetch messages instead (ie in SSR or Search Engine index bots such as Googlebot)
Easy to use: Easy to add to an existing Angular application, easy to manage server-side component.
Flexible: Built with customizability and extension in mind

Try it out

Features

Simple addressing of conversations by alphanumeric topic identifiers
Replies / threading (single layer)
Likes
Social sharing
Editable/deletable messages
Emojis
Efficient message counters for related UIs
Pluggable authentication and permission checks
Pluggable message transformation (ie editing out specific words as a comment/chat message is posted)

Components

packages/

common/ -- @banta/common: Code common to both frontend & server
frontend/ -- @banta/frontend: Banta website & Angular SDK
- projects/sdk -- @banta/sdk: Contains the client SDK for Angular
server/ -- @banta/server: Banta server

Dependencies

Frontend: Angular 11+ (latest version recommended)
Server
- MongoDB
- Redis

Development

First, make sure to install MongoDB and Redis and have them running on your machine. Then:

lerna bootstrap                    # installs all dependencies
lerna link                         # links dependent packages together without using the published NPM packages
lerna run build                    # build all packages from source

cd packages/frontend && npm run build:lib && npm start  # start the Angular application & SDK cradle
cd packages/server && npm start    # start the server application

Live developing SDK within external apps

Warning: This workflow is rather flaky.

If you wish to use npm link to work on the SDK from within the context of your own app, you will need to do:

# In banta project:
cd packages/frontend
npm run build:lib
cd dist/sdk             # IMPORTANT!
npm run start:lib       # will rebuild the SDK package whenever it changes

# In your app project:
npm link @banta/sdk
npm start               # will rebuild your project whenever the SDK changes

astronautlabs / banta