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Matrix Viewer

Join the community and get support at #matrix-viewer:matrix.org

Note The Matrix Public Archive has been renamed to Matrix Viewer to better reflect what it actually does and doesn't do. It's a viewer for world-readable Matrix rooms and doesn't actually archive anything.

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

Room directory homepage Room view
A reference for how the Matrix Viewer homepage looks. Search bar where you can find thousands of rooms using Matrix and homeserver selector. Grid of room cards showing the results. A reference for how the Matrix Viewer looks. Showing off a day of messages in #gitter:matrix.org on 2021-08-06. There is a date picker calendar in the right sidebar and a traditional chat app layout on the left.

Demo videos

The demo's refer to this project as the "Matrix Public Archive" which has now been renamed to "Matrix Viewer".

  • May 2023: Introducing archive.matrix.org, the shiny new public instance of the Matrix Public Archive that everyone can share and link to.
  • 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 /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

Get the app running

$ npm install
$ npm run build

# 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-viewer` project
$ git clone [email protected]:matrix-org/matrix-viewer.git
$ cd matrix-viewer
$ 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-viewer` to run. Hopefully soon, we can get all of the custom
# changes mainlined so this isn't necessary.
$ git clone [email protected]: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-viewer
$ npm link hydrogen-view-sdk

Running tests

See the testing documentation.

Tracing

See the tracing documentation.