# Embed Discourse comments on another website via Javascript

**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/embed-discourse-comments-on-another-website-via-javascript/31963
**Category:** Integrations
**Tags:** embedding, how-to
**Created:** [August 10, 2015, 6:20pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/embed-discourse-comments-on-another-website-via-javascript/31963 "2015-08-10T18:20:46Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

### Author: ![Discourse](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/discourse/32/148734_2.png) [@Discourse](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Discourse)
#### Post date: [August 10, 2015, 6:20pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/embed-discourse-comments-on-another-website-via-javascript/31963/1 "2015-08-10T18:20:46Z")

</div>

Discourse has the ability to embed the comments from a topic in a remote site using a Javascript API that creates an IFRAME. For an example of this in action, check out [Coding Horror’s blog](http://blog.codinghorror.com/welcome-to-the-internet-of-compromised-things/#discourse-comments). The blog is run via [Ghost](https://ghost.org/) but the comments are embedded from his [Discourse forum](http://discourse.codinghorror.com/t/welcome-to-the-internet-of-compromised-things/3550).

One important thing to note with this setup is that **users have to navigate to your forum to post replies**. This is intentional, as we feel that the posting interface on a Discourse forum is currently much richer than what we could embed via Javascript.

This guide will show how to set up comment embedding on your own blog or web site.

### How it works

In Discourse, a topic is made up of many posts. When you are _embedding_ Discourse on another site, you are linking a document (blog entry, HTML page, etc.) with a single _topic_. When people post in that topic, their comments will automatically show up on the page you embedded it in.

You have the choice to have Discourse create the topics automatically when a new embedding is found, or you can create the topics yourself in advance.

### Configuring Discourse for Embedding (simple setup)

The following setup will embed a comment feed on a page on a fake blog URL of `http://example.com/blog/entry-123.html`, from a discourse forum running at `=DISCOURSE=`.

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1. Visit **Admin \> Customize \> Embedding** on your Discourse install. https://=DISCOURSE=/admin/customize/embedding

2. Create at least one **Embeddable Host**. This should be the hostname (domain) where you want to embed your comments. In this case the host is `=BLOG=` – note the lack of `http://` and path.

3. Navigate to the **Posts and Topics** tab and fill in the **Username for topic creation** field. This is the user who will create topics when new embeddings are found. Let’s assume our discourse has a user called eviltrout, so the value is `eviltrout`.

4. Insert the following HTML on the web page at `http://=BLOG=/blog/entry-123.html`

```html
<div id='discourse-comments'></div>

<script type="text/javascript">
  DiscourseEmbed = {
    discourseUrl: 'https://discourse.example.com/',
    discourseEmbedUrl: 'http://example.com/blog/entry-123.html',
    // className: 'CLASS_NAME',
  };

  (function() {
    var d = document.createElement('script'); d.type = 'text/javascript'; d.async = true;
    d.src = DiscourseEmbed.discourseUrl + 'javascripts/embed.js';
    (document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0] || document.getElementsByTagName('body')[0]).appendChild(d);
  })();
</script>

```

The configurable parts of the snippet are in the `DiscourseEmbed` object. `discourseUrl` is the full path to the base of your discourse, including the trailing slash. The `discourseEmbedUrl` is the document that is currently embedding a comment feed.

If you set this up correctly, the first time you visit `http://=BLOG=/blog/entry-123.html` it will try to load comments for the blog post. Since there are none, it will tell the Discourse forum to create a new topic in the background. A new topic will be created by `eviltrout` and the contents of the first post will be crawled from your blog and the text will be extracted automatically.

Once the new topic is created, users can post on it, and their comments will automatically be displayed the next time `http://=BLOG=/blog/entry-123.html` is visited.

`className` is optional and will add a class of your choice to the embed so you can customize it with CSS.

> 💡 **Tip:** If your blog has multiple authors, you can add a `<meta name="discourse-username" content="author_username">` tag to each page. When Discourse crawls the page to create the topic, it will use this meta tag to determine the post author, overriding the default username set in the admin settings.

### Embedding on more than one page

In the above example we hard coded our `http://=BLOG=/blog/entry-123.html` URL when embedding the snippet of Javascript. This usually won’t be enough as many sites have many pages that are generated automatically. For example on a blog each entry typically gets its own page. To support this, put the same snippet on each page you want to display comments on, but replace the value passed to `discourseEmbedUrl` with the current page’s URL. On my blog, I use the following value for `discourseEmbedUrl`: `'http://eviltrout.com<%= current_page.url %>'` – as new blog pages are created, new topics will be created for them automatically on Discourse.

### Styling your Embedded content

You have the ability to add a stylesheet for your embedded comments. Use the **Embedded CSS** section of the Theme editor at **Admin \> Customize \> Themes \> [your theme] \> Edit CSS/HTML** and you can add a custom stylesheet that will be served up with your embedded comments. By default we think the layout looks nice on a white background, but if your site has a unique layout you’ll want to style it yourself.

### (Optional) Adding a Feed for Polling

As mentioned above, Discourse will automatically crawl any site it is embedded on. However, sometimes HTML can be hard to parse and it might not extract the contents of your posts correctly. Many blogs and web sites support RSS/Atom feeds for syndication, and Discourse can use this to extract the content of your blog posts more accurately.

Discourse ships with the [RSS Polling plugin](https://github.com/discourse/discourse/tree/main/plugins/discourse-rss-polling) (included by default). If you have a RSS or Atom feed set up on the site you are embedding Discourse into, you can enable the `rss_polling_enabled` site setting and add your feed’s URL via **Admin \> Plugins \> RSS Polling**. Once the feed URL has been added, Discourse will parse the feed and publish its posts to the appropriate category based on the Allowed Hosts that you add to your Embedding settings.

### (Alternate Configuration) Linking to existing topics

Some people prefer to not have Discourse create topics for them automatically on their forums. They’d like to create the topics themselves, then simply tell their embedding code what topic they want to associate with. You can do this by slightly changing your embedding code:

```html
<div id='discourse-comments'></div>

<script type="text/javascript">
  window.DiscourseEmbed = {
    discourseUrl: 'https://=DISCOURSE=/',
    topicId: 12345
  };

  (function() {
    var d = document.createElement('script'); d.type = 'text/javascript'; d.async = true;
    d.src = window.DiscourseEmbed.discourseUrl + 'javascripts/embed.js';
    (document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0] || document.getElementsByTagName('body')[0]).appendChild(d);
  })();
</script>

```

The only difference here is we’ve replaced `discourseEmbedUrl` with the id of a topic from Discourse. If you do this, no topic will be created and the comments from that topic will automatically be displayed.

### Setting the referrer policy

Due to recent (September 2020) [changes](https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2020/07/referrer-policy-new-chrome-default) to the default referrer policy that is set by many browsers, Discourse now explicitly defaults to setting the iframe’s referrer policy to `"no-referrer-when-downgrade"`. If, for security reasons your site requires a stricter referrer policy, it can be set by adding a `discourseReferrerPolicy` value to the embed script’s `DiscourseEmbed` object. For example:

```js
DiscourseEmbed = { discourseUrl: 'https://forum.example.com/',
                                  discourseEmbedUrl: '<your_posts_canonical_URL>',
                                  discourseReferrerPolicy: 'strict-origin-when-cross-origin'};

```

### Programmatically querying the Embed details

We have an API endpoint to query the Embed details using the embed\_url as the parameter:

```plaintext
curl 'https://meta.discourse.org/embed/info?embed_url=https://blog.discourse.org/2021/04/discourse-team-grows-to-50' -H 'API-KEY: logapikeygoeshere' -H 'API-USERNAME: apiusernamehere' 

```

And the response is:

```json
{
  "topic_id": 187794,
  "post_id": 925017,
  "topic_slug": "discourse-team-grows-to-50-blog",
  "comment_count": 2
}

```

### Embedding comments from a private site

For private Discourse instances, if Discourse is on a subdomain of the blog’s domain, comments will be displayed for users who are logged into Discourse. Users who are not logged into Discourse will see a ‘refused to connect’ message. If Discourse and the blog are on completely separate domains, no comments will be displayed for private forums.

### Troubleshooting

The most common issue users have when embedding Discourse is setting the correct value for the embeddable hosts you added. Make sure to double check that it is only the domain of your site, and contains no extra slashes or invalid characters.

> Last edited by @JammyDodger 2024-05-26T06:44:14Z
> 
> > **Check document**
> >
> > Perform check on document:

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