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Matrix Public Archive

In the vein of feature parity with Gitter, the goal is to make a public archive site for world_readable Matrix rooms like Gitter's archives which search engines can index and keep all of the content accessible/available.

Demo videos

Aug 2022 (blog post): A quick intro of what the project looks like, the goals, what it accomplishes, and how it's a new portal into the Matrix ecosystem.
Oct 2022: Showing off the room directory landing page used to browse everything available in the archive.

Technical overview

We server-side render (SSR) the Hydrogen Matrix client on a Node.js server (since both use JavaScript) and serve pages on the fly (with some Cloudflare caching on top) when someone requests /archives/r/matrixhq:matrix.org/${year}/${month}/${day}. To fetch the events for a given day/time, we use MSC3030's /timestamp_to_event endpoint to jump to a given day in the timeline and fetch the messages from a Matrix homeserver.

Re-using Hydrogen gets us pretty and native(to Element) looking styles and keeps the maintenance burden of supporting more event types in Hydrogen.

FAQ

See the FAQ page.

Setup

Prerequisites

Node.js v18
- We need v18 because it includes fetch by default. And node-fetch doesn't support abortSignal.reason yet.
- We need v16 because it includes require('crypto').webcrypto.subtle for Matrix encryption (olm) which can't be disabled in Hydrogen yet. And abortSignal.reason was introduced in v16.14.0 (although we use node-fetch for now).
A Matrix homeserver that supports MSC3030's /timestamp_to_event endpoint
- Synapse 1.73.0+

Get the app running

$ npm install

# Edit `config/config.user-overrides.json` so that `matrixServerUrl` points to
# your homeserver and has `matrixAccessToken` defined
$ cp config/config.default.json config/config.user-overrides.json

$ npm run start

Development

# Clone and install the `matrix-public-archive` project
$ git clone git@github.com:matrix-org/matrix-public-archive.git
$ cd matrix-public-archive
$ npm install

# Edit `config/config.user-overrides.json` so that `matrixServerUrl` points to
# your homeserver and has `matrixAccessToken` defined
$ cp config/config.default.json config/config.user-overrides.json

# This will watch for changes, rebuild bundles and restart the server
$ npm run start-dev

If you want to make changes to the underlying Hydrogen SDK as well, you can locally link it into this project with the following instructions:

# We need to use a draft branch of Hydrogen to get the custom changes needed for
# `matrix-public-archive` to run. Hopefully soon, we can get all of the custom
# changes mainlined so this isn't necessary.
$ git clone git@github.com:vector-im/hydrogen-web.git
$ cd hydrogen-web
$ git checkout madlittlemods/matrix-public-archive-scratch-changes
$ yarn install
$ yarn build:sdk
$ cd target/ && npm link && cd ..
$ cd ..

$ cd matrix-public-archive
$ npm link hydrogen-view-sdk

Running tests

See the testing documentation.

Tracing

See the tracing documentation.

4.7 KiB Raw Blame History