I’ve been meaning to add a commenting system to this blog for a while, but I couldn’t think of a good way to do it. I implemented my own commenting system on my old Django personal site. While I enjoyed working on it at the time, it was a lot of work, especially to fight the spam. Now that my blog is hosted statically on Github’s servers, I have no way to host something dynamic like comments.
Disqus seems to be the popular solution to this problem for other people that host static blogs. The way it works is that you serve a javascript client script on the static site you own. The script will make AJAX requests to a separate server that Disqus owns to retrieve comments and post new ones.
The price you pay for using Disqus, however, is that they get to sell all of the data that you and your commenters give them. That reason, plus the fact that I wanted something more DIY, meant this blog has gone without comments for a few years.
Then I discovered Isso. Isso calls itself a lightweight alternative to Disqus. Isso allows you to install the server code on your own server so that the comment data never goes to a third party. Also, it does not require logging into some social media account just to comment. Today, I installed it on my personal AWS EC2 instance and added the Isso javascript client script on this blog. So far, my experience with it has been great and it performs exactly the way I expect.
I hit a few snags while installing it, however.
Debian Package
I don’t recommend using the Debian package anymore as it frequently goes out of date and breaks on distribution upgrades. See bottom edit.
There is a very handy Debian package
that someone has made for Isso. Since my server runs Ubuntu 16.04, and Ubuntu is
based off of Debian, this is a package I can install with my normal ubuntu
package manager utilities. There is no PPA to install since the package is in
the main Ubuntu package archive. Just
run sudo apt-get install isso.
I got a bit confused after that point, though. There seems to be no documentation I could find about how to actually configure and start the server once you have installed it. This is what I did:
sudo cp /etc/default/isso /etc/isso.d/available/isso.cfg
sudo ln -s /etc/isso.d/available/isso.cfg /etc/isso.d/enabled/isso.cfg
Then you can edit /etc/isso.d/available/isso.cfg with your editor of choice to
configure the Isso server for your
needs. Make sure to set
the host variable to the URL for your static site.
Once you’re done, you can run sudo service isso restart to reload the server
with the new configuration. sudo service isso status should report Active
(running).
Right now, there should be a gunicorn process running
the isso server. You can check that with top or running ps aux | grep
gunicorn, which should return something about “isso”.
Nginx Reverse Proxy
In order to map the URL “comments.hallada.net” to this new gunicorn server, I need an nginx reverse proxy.
To do that, I made a new server block: sudo vim
/etc/nginx/sites-available/isso which I added:
server {
listen 80;
listen [::]:80;
server_name comments.hallada.net;
location / {
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
proxy_set_header X-Script-Name /isso;
proxy_set_header Host $host;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
proxy_pass http://localhost:8000;
}
}
Then I enabled this new server block with:
sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/isso /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/isso
sudo systemctl restart nginx
DNS Configuration
I added a new A record for “comments.hallada.net” that pointed to my server’s IP address to the DNS configuration for my domain (which I recently switched to Amazon Route 53).
After the DNS caches had time to refresh, visiting http://comments.hallada.net
would hit the new isso nginx server block, which would then pass the request
on to the gunicorn process.
You can verify if nginx is getting the request by looking at
/var/log/nginx/access.log.
Adding the Isso Script to my Jekyll Site
I created a file called _includes/comments.html with the contents that the
Isso documentation
provides. Then, in my post template, I simply included that on the page where I
wanted the comments to go:
<div class="card">
<div class="row clearfix">
<div class="column full">
<script data-isso="https://comments.hallada.net/"
src="https://comments.hallada.net/js/embed.min.js"></script>
<section id="isso-thread">
<noscript>Javascript needs to be activated to view comments.</noscript>
</section>
</div>
</div>
</div>
Another thing that was not immediately obvious to me is that the value of the
name variable in the Isso server configuration is the URL path that you will
need to point the Isso JavaScript client to. For example, I chose name = blog,
so the data-isso attribute on the script tag needed to be
http://comments.hallada.net/blog/.
The Uncaught ReferenceError
You won’t need to fix this if you install Isso from PIP! See bottom edit.
There’s an issue with that Debian
package that causes a JavaScript error in the console when trying to load the
Isso script in the browser. I solved this by uploading the latest version of the
Isso embeded.min.js file to my server, which I put at
/var/www/html/isso/embeded.min.js. Then I modified the nginx server block to
serve that file when the path matches /isso:
server {
listen 80;
listen [::]:80;
server_name comments.hallada.net;
root /var/www/html;
location / {
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
proxy_set_header X-Script-Name /isso;
proxy_set_header Host $host;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
proxy_pass http://localhost:8000;
}
location /isso {
try_files $uri $uri/ $uri.php?$args =404;
}
}
Now requesting http://comments.hallada.net/isso/embeded.min.js would return
the newer script without the bug.
Sending Emails Through Amazon Simple Email Service
I already set up Amazon’s SES in my last
blog
post.
To get Isso to use SES to send notifications about new comments, create a new
credential in the SES UI, and then set the user and password fields in the
isso.cfg to what get’s generated for the IAM user. The SES page also has
information for what host and port to use. I used security = starttls and
port = 587. Make sure whatever email you use for from is a verified email in
SES. Also, don’t forget to add your email as the to value.
Enabling HTTPS with Let’s Encrypt
Let’s Encrypt allows you to get SSL certificates for free! I had already installed the certbot/letsencrypt client before, so I just ran this to generate a new certificate for my new sub-domain “comments.hallada.net”:
sudo letsencrypt certonly --nginx -d comments.hallada.net
Once that successfully completed, I added a new nginx server block for the https
version at /etc/nginx/sites-available/isso-https:
server {
listen 443 ssl http2;
listen [::]:443 ssl http2;
server_name comments.hallada.net;
root /var/www/html;
ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/comments.hallada.net/fullchain.pem;
ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/comments.hallada.net/privkey.pem;
ssl_trusted_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/comments.hallada.net/fullchain.pem;
location / {
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
proxy_set_header X-Script-Name /isso;
proxy_set_header Host $host;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
proxy_pass http://localhost:8000;
}
location /isso {
try_files $uri $uri/ $uri.php?$args =404;
}
}
And, I changed the old http server block so that it just permanently redirects to the https version:
server {
listen 80;
listen [::]:80;
server_name comments.hallada.net;
root /var/www/html;
location / {
return 301 https://comments.hallada.net$request_uri;
}
}
Then I enabled the https version:
sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/isso-https /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/isso-https
sudo systemctl restart nginx
I checked that I didn’t get any errors visiting https://comments.hallada.net/,
and then changed my Jekyll include snippet so that it pointed at the https
site instead of http.
Now you can securely leave a comment if you want to yell at me for writing the wrong thing!
EDIT 5/28/2019:
I don’t recommend using the Debian package anymore since it frequently goes out of date and breaks when upgrading your Linux distribution.
Instead, follow the Isso docs by
creating a virtualenv and then run pip
install isso and pip install gunicorn from within the virtualenv. Then, when
creating a systemd
service,
make sure to point to the gunicorn executable in that virtualenv (e.g.
/opt/isso/bin/gunicorn). It should load and run Isso from the same virtualenv.
