intercom-react

An Intercom component for React that truly encapsulates the library and makes it work like a "real" React component.

Installation

yarn add intercom-react

️️⚠️ Before you install the library make sure to read the notes on reliability.

Setup

<Intercom
  open
  appId="fyq3wodw"
  user={{
    user_id: '9876',
    email: '[email protected]',
    created_at: 1234567890,
    name: 'John Doe',
  }}
  onOpen={() => {}}
  onClose={() => {}}
  onUnreadCountChange={unreadCount => {}}
  onInitialization={intercom => {}}
/>

• appId: the ID of your app.
• user (optional): all user data. If this changes during the lifecycle the component will call intercom('update', userData).
• open (optional): whether Intercom is showing or not.
• onOpen (optional): called when intercom opens.
• onClose (optional): called when intercom closes.
• onUnreadCountChange (optional): called when the unread count changes.
• onInitialization (optional): called when intercom has initialized. The component passes the intercom method to this callback in case you require advanced usage like emitting events or pre-populating content.
• launcher (optional): whether a launcher button should be shown. Defaults to true.

How is this different?

Intercom is the support tool of choice for myself and the companies I work for (because its an amazing tool!). An issue I have always had with their library is that its not particularly React friendly. There is a set of React Intercom libraries out there but most of them just mount Intercom to the global scope.

What this means is that if you would get into a situation where you would have to unmount Intercom the three DOM nodes the library mounts (#intercom-container, #intercom-stylesheet and #intercom-frame) will stay mounted, as will the four event listeners the library mounts (2x beforeunload and 2x message). In other words the existing components are not unmountable.

I wrote this component to create an isolated Intercom component that cleans up after itself when unmounted for a "true" React experience.

⚠️ A few notes on reliability

The main purpose of this component is to provide a way for you to integrate Intercom into your project without having it live in the global scope and it therefor being unmountable.

Getting that to work took quite a bit of reverse engineering and I haven't been able to find a way to include a specific version of the library yet which means that things might stop working as new versions of the Intercom library release and that the library should therefor be viewed as experimental.

I would therefor recommend that you only use this library if you have a very solid reason for needing Intercom to be unmountable. If not I recommend you use a solution like react-intercom which simply mounts Intercom to the global scope.

Having that said I appreciate your interest in the library and look forward to hearing about your experience with it 🙌 .

🏗 Contributing

1. Make your changes.
2. Check your changes in the playground (yarn playground).
3. Build using yarn build and change your playground Intercom import to the build by changing the path to ../.
4. Test you changes in/on multiple browsers and devices.
5. Add/Alter the appropriate tests.
6. Make sure all tests pass (yarn lint && yarn test).
7. Create a PR.