Chatter

Chatter is a statically generated comment engine for embedding on any website. Being statically generated means no database is needed, which makes it very lightweight.

Running on AWS lambda makes it incredibly cost effective for small sites, and leaning on Zappa makes management simple.

See an example

How it works

New comments are submitted to an API endpoint running inside AWS Lambda, which writes the comment to an S3 bucket. A second lambda function will then build a json index of the comments, which is what will be read by the user's browser.

At the moment it's up to you to submit and render comments, but there's some example code on the gh-pages branch.

Getting started

Authentication

You must set up an AWS credentials file.

Installation

Install the dependencies using pipenv

$ pipenv install

Go inside the virtualenv pipenv created so Zappa recognises it as a venv

$ source $(pipenv --venv)/bin/activate

Configuration

Change the bucket in the top of chatter.py. This is where we'll store comments and indexes.
Change arn in zappa_settings.json to match the input bucket so zappa can register an event handler.
Change s3_bucket in zappa_settings.json. This is where zappa will build the packages for lambda.
Add the url of the websites you're going to be creating new comments on to the CORS call under app = Flask(__name__) so we can set HTTP headers appropriately

Deployment

$ zappa deploy dev