Written by eyenx on May 28, 2020

Migrating from Disqus to Isso

First of all: Thank you Disqus. I used it for a few years. And it worked well. But it was time to look for a self-hosted commenting server. And this is where Isso comes into play.

Isso is a very lightweight commenting server you can host yourself, and the cool thing is, it even allows you to import comments from other providers like Disqus or Wordpress.

In this post, I will quickly show you how I migrated to Isso in a matter of minutes!

export your data first

Head out to your Disqus dashboard. Login in to the admin interface and you’ll find an export button. It should be available under the URL Path: /admin/discussions/export.

You can then start an export and wait for the download link you’ll get per mail.

The download is hosted on the domain https://media.disqus.com which had a expired SSL certificate for me:

openssl s_client -connect media.disqus.com:443 <<< QUIT | openssl x509  -noout -enddate
depth=2 C = US, O = DigiCert Inc, OU = www.digicert.com, CN = DigiCert Global Root CA
verify return:1
depth=1 C = US, O = DigiCert Inc, CN = DigiCert SHA2 Secure Server CA
verify return:1
depth=0 C = US, ST = California, L = San Francisco, O = "Disqus, Inc.", CN = *.disqus.com
verify error:num=10:certificate has expired
notAfter=Apr 27 12:00:00 2020 GMT
verify return:1
depth=0 C = US, ST = California, L = San Francisco, O = "Disqus, Inc.", CN = *.disqus.com
notAfter=Apr 27 12:00:00 2020 GMT
verify return:1
DONE
notAfter=Apr 27 12:00:00 2020 GMT

As we are migrating away from this provider, it doesn’t matter to us:

curl https://media.disqus.com/uploads/exports/your/download/url/you/got/per/mail.xml.gz -o disqus.xml.gz
gunzip disqus.xml

setting up the Isso environment

You’ll need a subdomain with the sole purpose of hosting your commenting server. A.e isso.domain.tld.

After that, I headed to Isso’s GitHub repository and build a Docker image for the server

git clone github.com/posativ/isso
cd isso
docker build . -t isso

FYI: I’m planning to automate the build, as I only found some old images on Docker hub and usually use newer images. I’ll share the image URL as soon as I set up the CI build.

Now let’s set up our directories to hold the database (SQLite) and the isso.cfg file:

mkdir /myissoinstance/config
mkdir /myissoinstance/db

The isso.cfg is a really easy to configure file. This is a template of mine:

[general]
dbpath = /db/comments.db # where the db is located at
host = # allowed hosts to use the server
    http://domain.tld
    https://domain.tld
    https://otherblog.domain.tld
    http://localhost:8080/

notify = smtp # notify per mail

[smtp] # mail notification configuration
username = isso@domain.tld
password = mailpasswordsaredumb
host = mail.domain.tld
port = 587
security = starttls
to = me@domain.tld
from = isso@domain.tld
timeout = 10

[guard] # spam guard
enabled = true
ratelimit = 2
direct-reply = 3
reply-to-self = false # some of this stuff can be overridden with the clien configuration
require-author = true
require-email = false

[markup] # what options can be used on the client-side
options = strikethrough, superscript, autolink
allowed-elements =
allowed-attributes =

[admin] # wether to have the /admin interface enabled or not 
enabled = true
password = THEVERYSECRETPASSWORD

Put it inside /myissoinstance/config/isso.cfg and also put your disqus.xml under /myissosinstance/config. Now it’s time to import your Disqus comments:

docker run -it --rm -v /myissoinstance/config:/config -v /myissoinstance/db:/db isso -c /config/isso.cfg import /config/disqus.xml

A database should now be available under /myissoinstance/db and you should see, that there is something inside it:

sqlite3 /myissoinstance/db
sqlite> select count(*) from comments;
18

Wow, all this fuss for 18 comments. But that is me. You might as well have 1800 comments as far as I know.

Docker compose

Now it’s time to make it run indefinitely with docker-compose.

I use traefik as my reverse proxy and have to configure this to make https://isso.domain.tld available:

version: '3.3'

services:
  app:
    image: isso
    networks:
      - default
    volumes:
      - /myissoinstance/config:/config
      - /myissoinstance/db:/db
    restart: always
    labels:
      - "traefik.frontend.entryPoints=http,https"
      - "traefik.port=8080"
      - "traefik.backend=myissoinstance_app"
      - "traefik.frontend.rule=Host:isso.domain.tld"
networks:
  default:
    external:
      name: docker

You could make it also available with any other reverse proxy, but the main thing here is, to be able to head to https://isso.domain.tld (or with /admin if the administration panel is active) and find your Isso instance.

client configuration

Now it’s time for the client configuration, or in other words, the configuration of javascript on your blog post.

There is a whole documenation page dedicated to it.

For my part it was pretty easy. Just include this block at the end of your posts:

<div class="block">
<script data-isso="https://isso.domain.tld/" data-isso-require-author="true" # overwriting spam guard preferences data-isso-avatar="false" src="https://isso.domain.tld/js/embed.min.js"></script> 
<section id="isso-thread"></section>
</div>

problems

I tested it out first on localhost and then deployed it to PROD. This way I saw that there was a problem with one of the comments which gave back a 500 internal server error and also, that my blog post scheme had changed.

I’ve been using trailing slash in my blog post URI for quite a while now, and Disqus was handling this without problems. But Isso isn’t. If my blog post requested the comments for a post with a trailing slash, it didn’t receive any comments back from Isso as there wasn’t a blog post registered in the database (after the import from Disqus) with trailing slash.

The easiest fix for me was obviously to read the whole code of Isso and create a pull request on Github to fix this, NOT. I’m no superman. I just used sqlite and added a trailing slash to all my registered blog post inside the Isso database. But perhaps some folks out there might want to take a look at this.

final words

This was quite a big change for only hosting 18 comments IMHO. But I’ve got now a good feeling about it because I’m not hosting the comments somewhere on a third party provider anymore, but have them under my complete control.

EDIT

I created a repository to automatically build Isso in a container. It will be available under eyenx/isso.

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