Mouthful is a self-hosted alternative to Disqus.

Mouthful is a lightweight commenting server written in GO and Preact. It's a self hosted alternative to disqus that's ad free.

There's a demo hosted at mouthful.dizzy.zone. Check it out!

Features

Multiple database support(sqlite, mysql, postgres, dynamodb)
Moderation with an administration panel
Server side caching to prevent excessive database calls
Rate limiting
Honeypot feature, to prevent bots from posting comments
Migrations from existing commenting engines(isso)
Configuration - most of the features can be turned on or off, as well as customized to your preferences.

Installation

The easy way

Head over to release page and download an archive for your OS. Extract, change the config.json you find in the archive according to your preferences. For more info on configuration, head to the configuration section.

Run the binary and that's it!

Building mouthful yourself

To start using mouthful, you'll need:

A working GO environment
Dep
Node with npm
A server to put mouthful on

If you do not have these tools set up, please refer to the installing dependencies section.

If you have all the dependencies, clone the mouthful repository. In the root of this repository run build.sh. Give it some time, this will install all the dependencies for both go and node and create a directory inside the root of this repository called /dist. Inside, you'll find all you need to run mouthful. That is:

A config file
A binary to start the mouthful backend
A static directory, containing all the javascript and html needed to serve both the client and the admin panel(if enabled)

To configure your mouthful instance to your hearts content, please refer to the configuration section.

Once you've done with the configuration, just copy over the /dist contents to your server and run the /dist/mouthful binary. Take note that the mouthful binary will look for a config.json file its directory.

Installing dependencies

To install Go, please refer to the GO documentation found here
To install node and npm, please refer to the Node documentation found here
To install Dep, please refer to Dep documentation found here
Once you have all the tools installed, follow the Installation guide

Configuring mouthful

Nearly all the features of mouthful can be customized and turned on or off. All within the config.json file.

Here's a short overview:

Moderation

Mouthful comes with moderation support out of the box. If moderation is enabled, it does not show the comments users post instantly, those will have to be approved first through the mouthful admin panel. This also allows for comment modification or deletion.

Caching

Mouthful can cache end results(full sets of comments for threads) for a given period of time. This allows for quicker responses, lower number of database queries at the cost of extra memory for the running mouthful binary.

Rate limiting

Mouthful can limit the amount of posts a person can post within the same hour.

Styling

Mouthful comes with a default style out of the box, but you can override it in a couple of ways:

Disable the default styling in config and add the required css to your webpage.
Fork the repo and change the style in client/src/components/client/style.scss.

Paging of comments

Mouthful can either display all the comments on page load, or page them. The page size can be specified in config.

Cross-Origin Resource Sharing

Mouthful can either allow all origins to access its backend from browser or limit that to a given list of domains.

Data sources

Mouthful supports different data stores for different needs. Currently supported data store list is as follows:

sqlite
postgres
mysql
aws dynamodb

For a list of configuration options and config file examples, head over to configuration documentation and examples

Contributing

Contributions are more than welcome. If you've found a bug, raise an issue. If you've got a feature request, open up an issue as well. I'll try and keep the api stable, as well as tag each release with a semantic version.

Wish list

I'm a keen backender and not too sharp on the frontend part. If you're willing to contribute, front end(both client and admin) are not in the best of shapes, especially the admin panel. Frontend might require a refactor. Any addition of tests would be great as well. Migrations from other commenting engines would be encouraged as well. If someone could send me a disqus dump, I'd make a migration for that.

Get in touch

If you'd like to get in touch with me, you can drop me a message on my twitter.

Who uses mouthful?

Mouthful authors' blog, dizzy.zone

Feel free to do a PR and include yourself if you end up using mouthful.