Embed format: GitHub Projects

[amywtlin]

Background

This is discussed in https://github.com/forem/forem/discussions/17289 and I am creating an issue to open this up for community contributions.

@jeremyf mentioned that as the links to GitHub Projects do not come with meta data we could leverage right away, this would require some work for the backend.

Definition of done (expected behavior)

When embedding a public GitHub project link in the editor (such as this one), we should render an embed, with specified data shown and in the generic format.

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[amywtlin]

@ludwiczakpawel I was looking for the finalized embed design spec and I think this is the one. Can you confirm? If it is the correct one, I'll need you to make the spec available here in the issue (I think we don't intend to share figma files publicly, right?), so contributors could also work on this issue.

Also - assigning this issue to you for now, and feel free to assign back to me when we have design spec here (feel free to edit my issue).

[amywtlin]

@jeremyf You mentioned in the discussion #17289 this will be customized and we need to decide what to show. Can you point me to a list of available data so I can evaluate what we should show?

Also assigning this issue to you for this information - feel free to unassign yourself when we have the requested information.

[ludwiczakpawel]

Couple thoughts to make sure we're on the same page...

• GitHub Projects do have opengraph/twitter meta data in the markup. But it's too generic, correct? (@jeremyf)
• GitHub Projects can be private OR public.
• For Private ones we can't really show anything more than just a generic embed we show for every other link that doesn't have associated existing liquid tag.
• For Public ones... What do we want to show actually? List of issues in particular project?
• Most importantly, WHY do we want GH projects to have special embed? How useful would it be to show Project with a list of issues associated with it? Keep in mind, issues are quite dynamic entity within projects (users often move them around, change statues etc) and our Liquid Tags are static (embed is generated when users publish post, and then it preserves it state on Forem - so changes affecting ACTUAL project would not be reflected in Forem's embed, unless users decide to resave the post (meaning: regenerating the embed)).

@jeremyf also question (out of curiosity): if we can't access anything useful through meta tags, then how do we do that? Through github's API or something?

[jeremyf]

@ludwiczakpawel

also question (out of curiosity): if we can't access anything useful through meta tags, then how do we do that? Through github's API or something?

We render a simple URL, assuming all the fallback conditions work correctly.

[jeremyf]

@ludwiczakpawel

GitHub Projects do have opengraph/twitter meta data in the markup. But it's too generic, correct?

It depends on what product wants to display; it might be adequate. The easiest thing to do would be to "wire in the project URL and see what happens" and from that take the next step of "do we design something specific or not"

[amywtlin]

I looked around how our existing GitHub embeds look like and I actually think it wasn't about creating a special format for the Projects. I agree with Pawel that most of the content we might want to show in an embed would be dynamic, which will not be suitable as we don't regenerate embeds.

It however doesn't create a generic embed with a public project link. @jeremyf Is that correct to assume we should at least be able to get a fallback embed with a public GitHub project link?

I tested with this link on Canary1 and it's throwing me this error:

I think if we are supposed to be able to show a generic embed, fixing this issue should be good enough, instead of creating a special embed.