google-forms-comments

A simple comment system that uses Google Forms and Google Sheets as its backend.

Code repository mirrors: GitHub, Codeberg, git.ardis.lu

Creating comments

To create new comments, the frontend directly POSTs to the Google Form. Since the POST is cross-origin, it is sent in no-cors mode and the response is opaque. The frontend assumes all POSTs are successful. If the POST is blocked by Google Forms for any reason (e.g. if Google suspects the end-user is a bot and does a CAPTCHA challenge), then the comment will be silently dropped.

Reading comments

The /functions/comments.js file is a Cloudflare Worker that acts as a proxy to access the Google Sheets API. The Cloudflare Worker injects a service account's credentials to the API request because the Google Sheets API requires authorization for all requests, even requests to public spreadsheets.

Local development

Use the wrangler CLI to serve the static frontend and the Cloudflare Worker proxy at the same time.

1. Copy .dev.vars.example and rename the copy to .dev.vars. Provide an email and private key for a service account with access to the Google Sheet that has the form responses.

2. npx wrangler pages dev .