Developer FAQ

@루루 said in NodeBB + ReactJS:

Are nodebb + nextjs compatible?

Is anything Nextjs compatible? lol
Unless Nextjs has changed in the last 3 months, it is super complicated to work with. Even then you have to use it on Vercel to have any hope of it working, as using Nextjs on another host is even more problematic.

I'm waiting for someone to tell me my past experiences are no longer valid?

On the wider-point of de-couplement, then yes, in principle modularity is a good principle to aim for. Im not a CSS fan so a year ago I did try making a pure js front end using nodebb API as a backend!
Unfortunately that project went by the wayside as it was a lot of work!

@baris updated to 3.7.2 and now just waiting for the plugin to be updated.

@solmak for benchpress specific syntax check here

Link Preview Image benchpressjs/docs at master · benchpressjs/benchpressjs

ultralight javascript templating framework. Contribute to benchpressjs/benchpressjs development by creating an account on GitHub.

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GitHub (github.com)

Yeah thanks guys, the key was copying the package.json file out of the install folder (copying, not moving, because install/package.json is then checked during build). Now everything can be installed in one command.

Translations are pulled regularly into the develop branch so whenever the next minor version is release ie 3.6.0 they become available. See https://community.nodebb.org/topic/17189/how-do-i-retrieve-the-latest-translations-from-transifex-without-waiting-for-misty for manual commands

@julian said in How do I create a registration interstitial?:

The hook is fired on POST /register so that the user can be redirected to the interstitial during the registration process. So you do need to have it respond there in order for the flow to work.

Interesting, the flow still seems to work perfectly (the custom interstitials do show up on redirect to /register/complete) with the following code right at the beginning of the hook handler:

const url = data.req.originalUrl; if (!url.startsWith("/register/complete")) { return data; }

How is that possible?

See https://github.com/NodeBB/NodeBB/issues/7319#issuecomment-487588369

@шЫкель-грубый said in How can I backdate topics and posts (for migration purposes)?:

I'll also try to comment date changing in sources. I'm not familiar with JS but it looks obviously enough.

Yes, this is probably the most direct solution. It'll get your script working with the correct timestamps, all you have to do is comment out that line in the file, and restart NodeBB.

thank you for this.

Your plugin may want to expose some user-specific options, and to accomplish that, you'll want to create a page accessible from within their user profile.

In Harmony, plugin-added pages are added to the left-hand sidebar:
ce07dc7d-e8f3-45a9-ac73-72f1f7309af2-image.png

In Persona, plugin-added pages are behind the overflow menu:
af0633f5-175d-45ff-802b-342a0885dd68-image.png

You'll need to add listeners to two hooks, and modify your page template accordingly.

static:app.load

Live example

You'll need to specify a route in the user profile using this hook. In it, note the accountMiddlewares block, which contains some common middlewares that are sensible defaults. You'll need middleware.buildAccountData in order to retrieve some boilerplate data that all account routes need.

filter:user.profileMenu

Live example

You'll then want to specify the menu option, including label, icon, and visibility options. visibility allows you to specify which users can see the option (e.g. self only, admins only, etc.)

The template

In your template for the user page, you'll want to prefix it with <!-- IMPORT partials/account/header.tpl --> and suffix it with <!-- IMPORT partials/account/footer.tpl -->. These two lines will wrap your template content with the theme-specific structure. For example, in Harmony, a sidebar is used in the accounts pages. The header and footer partials will ensure they are also present in your template. The middleware.buildAccountData middleware you added in the first step will ensure the data necessary is present.

Awesome! Thank you.

@baris thank you! I'll try your solution and update here

Let's say you have your own site and member database, with its own gated access to content, and you want to mimic this sort of arrangement with your forum.

e.g. On member site, you have free users and paid users, and you want to only allow access to a couple super special categories on community site to paid users, while free users get the regular set of categories.

The good news is, the Session Sharing plugin has had support for this since 2018!

You'll want to enable the options in the session sharing plugin:

2022-11-15_09-49.png

You can opt to only add users to groups, only remove users from groups, or both. You can also specify which groups that the automatic group syncing applies to

Once enabled, you need only update your shared cookie to contain a groups property, which is of type Array. This array contains the group names in NodeBB that the user should be a part of.

If group leaving is enabled, then the user will be removed from any groups that are not in this array, upon login/revalidation.

Once you have your group memberships sorted out, you'll want to restrict access to specific categories based on user group membership.

You can do that from the ACP > Manage > Privileges page. Simply remove access for the registered-users groups from your choice of categories, and grant those viewing/posting privileges to the paid users group.

Cool and for context a link to the upgrade doc section - https://docs.nodebb.org/configuring/upgrade/

I would really like to get this working.
Does anyone have any thoughts on why this code above might not work?
The board was converted from phpbb using a plugin. Is it possible that left something behind that is breaking the code shared above?

@stevefan1999-personal Considerations when scaling NodeBB are detailed here: https://docs.nodebb.org/configuring/scaling/

... but possibly not in the most digestable way. In summary, here's what you need:

Redis configured in config.json so it will be used as pubsub and for storing user sessions (volatile data) One of the workers needs isPrimary set to true in config.json, conversely, the other instances need jobsDisabled set to false For socket.io, you will need to make sure to use a ip hashing strategy when routing requests from the load balancer. A typical round-robin style means the socket.io handshake will fail since it ends up hitting different servers.

Okay mate thanks for the info, working fine now thanks a lot 😄

I'm assuming you're referring to the chart in the main admin control panel?

01782223-bf0e-457d-89dc-4b87b7ec44c6-image.png

The two main analytics tracked are pageviews and unique visitors.

Page views are fairly self-explanatory, one page load or transition to a new page counts as a new page view. Unique visitors is based on the IP address, and so every time a new IP address shows up in that hour, the count is incremented by one. We also track unique visitors on a daily, weekly, monthly, and all-time basis, for the numbers here: aafa1cf9-e038-4c67-b2ba-6e9f7edaad33-image.png The "registered", "guest", and "bot" variants for pageviews increment alongside each pageview, but depending on whether the user is logged in (or not), or whether that request came from a bot. "registered" and "guest" should add up to the total pageviews, since you're either registered or not. "bots" are usually also guests, but we use some basic logic to detect whether they're a bot or not (probably user-agent string) For a variety of reasons, the "bot" count is not always predictable, since some bots are rather obscure, or fudge their user-agent strings, so take this number with a grain of salt.

I hope that answers your questions, let me know if there's anything else you'd like to know.

This topic was created as an entry in the Developer FAQ. Respond below if you have additional information to add re: SSO or other session-sharing implementations.

The common causes for a session mismatch error are usually one of the following:

1. Mis-configured URL parameter in your config.json file

If you have a misconfigured url value in your config.json file, the cookie may be saved incorrectly (or not at all), causing a session mismatch error. Please ensure that the link you are accessing your site with and the url defined match.

2. Improper/malformed cookieDomain set in ACP

Sometimes admins set this value realising that they probably don't need to set it at all. The default is perfectly fine. If this is set, you'll want to revert the setting by editing your database directly:

Redis: hdel config cookieDomain
MongoDB: db.objects.update({ _key: "config" }, { $set: { "cookieDomain": "" } });

3. Missing X-Forwarded-Proto header from nginx/apache

If you are using a reverse proxy, you will need to have nginx pass a header through to NodeBB so it correctly determines the correct cookie secure property.

In nginx, you will need to add the directive like so:

location / { ... proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme; ... }

This topic was created as an entry in the Developer FAQ. Respond below if you have additional information to add re: SSO or other session-sharing implementations.

The recommended method of sharing sessions between two separate and distinct applications is through OAuth2. We recommend this approach because NodeBB maintains its own user records, so that we can keep track of user-related metrics and other data. Relying on another database would be tricky, prone to breaking, and quite possibly dangerous.

Luckily, it's quite straightforward to get things working with OAuth2!

The first step is getting your application to expose an OAuth2 endpoint. If you're running a Node.js based app, you can use a module called OAuth2orize.

Once that is set up, you'll want to take a look at the SSO plugin skeleton for customised OAuth deployments -- nodebb-plugin-sso-oauth. You'll take this plugin, fork it, and modify it to communicate with your OAuth endpoint.

Once everything is working properly, you should be able to register and log in/out via your web app.