Easily embed a near social widget into any web app and deploy to web4.
near-social-viewer is a web component (custom element) that implements the near-social-vm for rendering code stored on-chain in the SocialDB smart contract (social.near). It is the simplest way to create your own near social viewer and it is the easiest method for embedding Widgets into any web application.
Table of Contents
Via CDN
Include the following script tags in your HTML:
<script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/near-bos-webcomponent@latest/dist/runtime.REPLACE_WITH_BUNDLE_HASH.bundle.js"></script>
<script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/near-bos-webcomponent@latest/dist/main.REPLACE_WITH_BUNDLE_HASH.bundle.js"></script>Be sure to replace REPLACE_WITH_BUNDLE_HASH with the respective hash, which can be found via the asset-manifest:
https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/near-bos-webcomponent@latest/dist/asset-manifest.json
Via NEARFS web4 gateway
Include the following script tags in your HTML:
<script src="https://ipfs.web4.near.page/ipfs/REPLACE_WITH_NEARFS_CID/runtime.REPLACE_WITH_BUNDLE_HASH.bundle.js"></script>
<script src="https://ipfs.web4.near.page/ipfs/REPLACE_WITH_NEARFS_CID/main.REPLACE_WITH_BUNDLE_HASH.bundle.js"></script>Be sure to replace REPLACE_WITH_NEARFS_CID with the cid you get from publishing to nearfs and replace REPLACE_WITH_BUNDLE_HASH with the respective hash, which can be found via the asset-manifest:
https://ipfs.web4.near.page/ipfs/REPLACE_WITH_NEARFS_CID/asset-manifest.json
Once included, you can use the web component in your HTML:
<near-social-viewer src="mob.near/widget/N" initialprops='{"hashtag": "build"}' />The web component supports several attributes:
src: the src of the widget to render (e.g.devs.near/widget/default)code: raw, valid, stringified widget code to render (e.g."return <p>hello world</p>")initialprops: initial properties to be passed to the rendered widgetrpc: rpc url to use for requests within the VMnetwork: network to connect to for rpc requests & wallet connectionconfig: options to modify the underlying VM or usage with devtools, see available configurations
To support specific features of the VM or an accompanying development server, provide a configuration following this structure:
{
"dev": {
// Configuration options dedicated to the development server
"hotreload": {
"enabled": boolean, // Determines if hot reload is enabled (e.g., true)
"wss": string // WebSocket server URL to connect to. Optional. Defaults to `ws://${window.location.host}` (e.g., "ws://localhost:3001")
}
},
// Configuration options for the VM
"vm": {
"features": {
"enableComponentSrcDataKey": boolean, // adds the "data-component" attribute specifying the rendered component's "src"
}
}
}There are several strategies for accessing local widget code during development.
The recommended, least invasive strategy is to provide a custom RPC url that proxies requests for widget code. Widget code is stored in the socialdb, and so it involves an RPC request to get the stringified code. We can proxy this request to use local data instead.
Either build a custom proxy server, or use bos-workspace which provides a proxy by default and will automatically inject it to the rpc attribute if you provide the path to your web component's dist, or a link to it stored on NEARFS. See more in Customizing the Gateway.
The NEAR Social VM supports a feature called redirectMap which allows you to load widgets from other sources than the on-chain social db. An example redirect map can look like this:
{ "devhub.near/widget/devhub.page.feed": { "code": "return 'hello';" } }The result of applying this redirect map is that the widget devhub.near/widget/devhub.page.feed will be replaced by a string that says hello.
The near-social-viewer web component supports loading a redirect map from the session storage, which is useful when using the viewer for local development or test pipelines.
By setting the session storage key nearSocialVMredirectMap to the JSON value of the redirect map, the web component will pass this to the VM Widget config.
Another option is to use the same mechanism as near-discovery, where you can load components from a locally hosted bos-loader by adding the key flags to localStorage with the value {"bosLoaderUrl": "http://127.0.0.1:3030" }. There also exists an input at dev.near.org/flags to input this url.
The above strategies require changes to be reflected either on page reload, or from a fresh rpc request. For faster updates, there is an option in config to enable hot reload via dev.hotreload (see configurations). This will try to connect to a web socket server on the same port, or via the provided url, to use redirectMap with most recent data.
This feature works best when accompanied with bos-workspace, which will automatically inject a config to the attribute if you provide the path to your web component's dist, or a link to it stored on NEARFS. See more in Customizing the Gateway. It can be disabled with the --no-hot flag.
yarn installFirst, run the development server:
yarn run devOpen http://localhost:3000 in your browser to see the result.
yarn run prodnpm run testSee the full testing guide.
Since NearSocial/VM v2.1.0, a gateway can register custom elements where the key is the name of the element, and the value is a function that returns a React component. For example:
initNear({
customElements: {
Link: (props) => {
if (!props.to && props.href) {
props.to = props.href;
delete props.href;
}
if (props.to) {
props.to = sanitizeUrl(props.to);
}
return <Link {...props} />;
},
},
});This is a helpful feature for exposing packages and component libraries that otherwise cannot be accessed through an iframe in typical Widget development. It enables developers to provide a sandbox for builders wanting to build with these elements without going through all the setup.
To distribute a specialized near-bos-webcomponent with its own custom elements:
- Use the template to create a new web component
- Install the necessary packages and add the custom VM element to
initNearfunction - Build and distribute the resulting
/dist
Then, the path to this dist can be referenced via the -g flag with bos-workspace.
bos-workspace dev -g ./path/to/distThis will start a local dev server using the custom gateway, so you may develop your local widgets through it with access to the custom element.
Since NearSocial/VM v1.3.0, the VM has exposed Ethers and ethers in the global scope, as well as a Web3Connect custom element for bringing up wallet connect.
There already exists support for most common EVM chains, but to add a new chain to your web3 provider, find your chain on ChainList and then add the necessary details to the chains.json. Be sure to include a testnet configuration as well. This will enable you to connect to the specified chain when using <Web3Connect /> within a widget running inside your custom web component.
You can configure the projectId and appMetadata in utils/web4/ethers.js as well.
For more information on how to utilize Ethers.js in your widgets, see NEAR for Ethereum developers. To see a list of existing EVM components built by the community, see here.
Normally, the URL path decides which component to be loaded. The path /devhub.near/widget/app will load the app component from the devhub.near account. DevHub is an example of a collection of many components that are part of a big app, and the app component is just a proxy to components that represent a page. Which page to display is controlled by the page query string parameter, which translates to props.page in the component.
In order to create a SEO friendly URL for such a page, we would like to represent a path like /devhub.near/widget/app?page=community&handle=webassemblymusic to be as easy as /community/webassemblymusic. And we do not want the viewer to look for a component named according to the path.
We can obtain this by setting the src attribute pointing to the component we want to use, and also set the initialProps attribute to the values taken from the URL path.
An example of this can be found in router.spec.js.
test("for supporting SEO friendly URLs, it should be possible to set initialProps and src widget from any path", async ({
page,
}) => {
await page.goto("/community/webassemblymusic");
await page.evaluate(() => {
const viewerElement = document.querySelector("near-social-viewer");
viewerElement.setAttribute("src", "devhub.near/widget/app");
const pathparts = location.pathname.split("/");
viewerElement.setAttribute(
"initialProps",
JSON.stringify({ page: pathparts[1], handle: pathparts[2] })
);
});
await expect(
await page.getByText("WebAssembly Music", { exact: true })
).toBeVisible();
});Here you can see that the viewer element src attribute is set to use the devhub.near/widget/app component, and the initialProps set to values from the path.
For testing how the library would work when used from CDN, you may publish it to NEARFS.
To publish, use the helper script to create and upload an IPFS CAR, deployed to nearfs with a signature from your NEAR account.
yarn prepare:release <signer account> <signer key> <network>This script will output the CID to terminal, as well as automatically save it under nearfs.cid in package.json.
Parameters:
signer account: NEAR account to use for signing IPFS URL update transaction, see web4-deploysigner key: NEAR account private key to use for signing. Should have base58-encoded key starting withed25519:. Will attempt to sign from keychain (~/.near-credentials/) if not provided.network: NEAR network to use. Defaults to mainnet.
This is an example of the NEARFS url, and you should replace with the cid you received above:
https://ipfs.web4.near.page/ipfs/bafybeiftqwg2qdfhjwuxt5cjvvsxflp6ghhwgz5db3i4tqipocvyzhn2bq/
After uploading, it normally takes some minutes before the files are visible on NEARFS. When going to the expected URL based on the IPFS address we saw above, we will first see the message Not found.
Contributions are what make the open source community such an amazing place to learn, inspire, and create. Any contributions you make are greatly appreciated.
If you're interested in contributing to this project, please read the contribution guide.