shadowchat

Shadowchat

• Self-hosted, non-custodial and minimalist Monero (XMR) superchat system written in Go.
• No JavaScript required (Minimally used to enhance QoL).
• Provides notification methods usable in OBS with an HTML page.

Installation

Building shadowchat requires:

• Go toolchain (at least version 1.21.x)

For the purposes of the examples, it is assumed that shadowchat will be installed in /opt/shadowchat.

Running shadowchat requires:

• A TLS terminating reverse proxy such as nginx.
• monero-wallet-rpc, bundled with all of the getmonero.org wallets, and packaged by various OSes.

Compiling

Once the executable is built, it is self-contained (portable) and can be copied around. The rest of the source directory is only required if customzing the appearance.

$ sudo mkdir -p /opt/shadowchat
$ sudo chown shadowchat:shadowchat /opt/shadowchat
$ go install gitgud.io/greyarea/shadowchat@latest
$ sudo mv $(go env GOPATH)/bin/shadowchat /opt/shadowchat/

$ git clone https://gitgud.io/greyarea/shadowchat.git
$ cd shadowchat
$ go build

You may wish to checkout a release tag instead of building master as master is not guaranteed to be stable.

Setup

Monero Wallet

1. Decide if your installation will have the shadowchat spawn monero-wallet-rpc (recomended) or not.
2. Generate a view only wallet using your preferred wallet software such as monero-wallet-gui/monero-wallet-cli. If shadowchat will spawn monero-wallet-rpc do NOT set a password.
3. Copy the walletname_viewonly and walletname_viewonly.keys files to the host that will run the wallet backend. Both files MUST be in the same directory (eg: /opt/shadowchat/walletname_viewonly and /opt/shadowchat/walletname_viewonly.keys).

If you are NOT going to have shadowchat spawn monero-wallet-rpc, start the RPC service:

$ monero-wallet-rpc \
    --rpc-bind-port 28088 \
    --daemon-address http://node.monerodevs.org:18089 \
    --wallet-file /opt/shadowchat/walletname_viewonly \
    --disable-rpc-login --password ""

Shadowchat

The shadowchat executable can create a commented example configuration file to use as the basis for the configuration. This MUST be edited and shadowchat will refuse to run with the default configuration.

$ /opt/shadowchat/shadowchat default-config -o /opt/shadowchat/config.yml
$ vi /opt/shadowchat/config.yml

The following config options should be set:

• display.auth_key: The "authentication key" for the view and alert pages.
• wallet.daemon.enable: true to have shadowchat spawn monero-wallet-rpc.
• wallet.daemon.wallet_path: The path of the view-only wallet (eg: /opt/shadowchat/walletname_viewonly).

Start the shadowchat service:

$ /opt/shadowchat/shadowchat -f /opt/shadowchat/config.yml

A simple systemd unit file is provided as an example.

Usage

• Visit 127.0.0.1:8900 to make superchats.
• Visit 127.0.0.1:8900/view?auth=auth_key_here to view the superchat history.
• Visit 127.0.0.1:8900/alert?auth=auth_key_here to view the alert "widget".

This is designed to be run on a cloud server behind a reverse-proxy that provides TLS, such as nginx.

There are a handful of sub-commands that can be used to administer a running instance, see shadowchat --help for more details.

If something goes horribly wrong and you wish to start over and delete all pending and paid-for superchats, stop the service and delete the store.db file.

If you decide to stop using shadowchat, but want to preserve the shadowchat history, see shadowchat dump --help.

OBS Alerts

• Add a Browser source in OBS and point it at https://shadowchat.example.com/alert?auth=auth_key_here

Customization

Unless you want to customize the assets, the shadowchat executable is portable and nothing else in the repository is required. Otherwise a copy of the assets directory from the source distribution is needed.

Changes made to the included assets will not be applied unless the binary is rebuilt OR the assets are explicitly loaded via setting BOTH the assets.disable_internal and assets.asset_dir config options.

JavaScript is 100% optional, content is generated server-side via the Go template library. All of the .tmpl files are HTML files containing templates.

The non-locale specific static assets such as images (eg: xmr.svg) and stylesheets (eg: style.css) can be overridden on a per-locale basis if a file of the same name is present in a locale sub-directory (eg: assets/en_US/style.css will take precidence over assets/style.css).

WARNING: When compiling shadowchat, all files in the assets sub-directory will be embedded in the executable, regardless of if they are used or not.

Future plans

• Improve the admin interface.
• Add an API endpoint to allow third-party client development.
• Widget for displaying top donors.

License

GPLv3-Only

The Shadowchan mascot (assets/logo.png) is distributed under CC BY-SA 4.0, and is free to copy, share, remix, and reuse under the terms of that license.

Origin

The shadowchat project was started at https://git.sr.ht/~anon_/shadowchat. The original author vanished off the face of the earth and the repository also has been removed, likely due to sr.ht's policies.

This fork loosly based on:

• https://github.com/lukesmithxyz/shadowchat
• Japanese localization and the Shadowchan mascot are based on https://gitgud.io/japananon/shadowchatjp and used with permission.
• Some UI improvements were inspired by https://github.com/inVariabl/shadowchat-improved.

The current implementation has little in common with the original or other forks.

Donate

The current maintainer is not accepting donations.