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Intercom Rails Plugin

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The easiest way to install Intercom in a rails app.

📘

For interacting with the Intercom REST API, use the intercom gem (https://github.com/intercom/intercom-ruby)

Installation

Add this to your Gemfile:

gem "intercom-rails"

Then run:

bundle install

Take note of your app_id from here and generate a config file:

rails generate intercom:config YOUR-APP-ID

📘

To make installing Intercom as easy as possible, where possible a <script> tag will be automatically inserted before the closing </body> tag. For most Rails apps, you won't need to do any extra config. Having trouble? Check out troubleshooting below.

Live Chat

With the Intercom Messenger you can chat with users and visitors to your web site. Include the Intercom Messenger on every page by setting:

config.include_for_logged_out_users = true

Disabling automatic insertion

To disable automatic insertion for a particular controller or action you can:

skip_after_action :intercom_rails_auto_include

Troubleshooting

If it's not working make sure:

  • You've generated a config file with your app_id as detailed above.
  • Your user object responds to an id or email method.
  • Your current user is accessible in your controllers as current_user or @user, if not in 
config.user.current = Proc.new { current_user_object }

If your users can be defined in different ways in your app you can also pass an array as follows :

config.user.current = [Proc.new { current_user_object }, Proc.new { @user_object }]
  • If you want the Intercom Messenger to be available when there is no current user, set config.include_for_logged_out_users = true in your config and sign up for the Respond package.

Feel free to mail us: [email protected], if you're still having trouble.

Configuration

API Secret

If you want to use secure mode, ensure you set your API secret in config/initializers/intercom.rb:

config.api_secret = '123456'

❗️

This example is just for the sake of simplicity, you should never include your api secret in source control. Instead, you should use the Rails secret config feature.

Shutdown

If you using the Intercom Messenger any user that uses a shared computer and browser with someone else will be able to see the most recently logged in user’s conversation history until the cookie expires.
Because of this, it’s very important to properly shutdown Intercom when a user’s session on your app ends (via manually or automatically logging out).

Authentication

Using Devise

If you use devise, you can override (if not already done) the session_controller by replacing in your config/routes.rb:

devise_for :users
#by
devise_for :users, controllers: {sessions: "sessions"}

Then you can use the following code to prepare Intercom Shutdown on log out in your app/session_controller.rb

class SessionsController < Devise::SessionsController
  after_action :prepare_intercom_shutdown, only: [:destroy]
  # Your logic here
  protected
  def prepare_intercom_shutdown
    IntercomRails::ShutdownHelper.prepare_intercom_shutdown(session)
  end
end

Assuming that the destroy method of session_controller redirects to your visitors_controller.rb#index method, edit your visitors_controller as follow :

class VisitorsController < ApplicationController
  after_action :intercom_shutdown, only: [:index]
  def index
    # You logic here
  end
  # You logic here
  protected
  def intercom_shutdown
    IntercomRails::ShutdownHelper.intercom_shutdown(session, cookies)
  end
end

Using another service

If you use another service than Devise or if you implemented your own authentication service, you can call the following method in a controller to shutdown Intercom on logout.

IntercomRails::ShutdownHelper::intercom_shutdown_helper(cookies)

❗️

Be aware that if you call this method before a 'redirect_to' (quite common on logout) it will have no impact as it is impossible to update cookies when you use a redirection.
But you can use the same logic as the devise implementation above.

Session duration

To add a session_duration variable (in ms) to the widget, add the following line to config/initializers/intercom.rb:

config.session_duration = 5 * 60 * 1000

That will force your Intercom session to expire after 5 minutes which is the minimum amount of time authorized.

📘

More information about how session_duration works in intercom documentation

Custom attributes

User Custom data attributes

You can associate any attributes, specific to your app, with a user in Intercom.
For custom data attributes you want updated on every request set them in config/initializers/intercom.rb, the latest value will be sent to Intercom on each page visit.

Configure what attributes will be sent using either a:

  • Proc which will be passed the current user object
  • Or, a method which will be sent to the current user object

e.g.

config.user.custom_data = {
    :plan => Proc.new { |user| user.plan.name },
    :is_paid => Proc.new { |user| user.plan.present? },
    :email_verified => :email_verified?
  }

In some situations you'll want to set some custom data attribute specific to a request.
You can do this using the intercom_custom_data helper available in your controllers:

class AppsController < ActionController::Base
  def activate
    intercom_custom_data.user[:app_activated_at] = Time.now
    ...
  end

  def destroy
    intercom_custom_data.user[:app_deleted_at] = Time.now
    ...
  end
end

Attributes must be accessible in order to sync with intercom.
Additionally, attributes ending in "_at" will be parsed as times.

Custom attributes for non-signed up users

In situations where you want to pass in specific request based custom data for non-signed up users or leads, you can do that by setting custom attributes in config/initializers/intercom.rb.

Any of these attributes can be used to pass in custom data.

Example:

config.user.lead_attributes = %w(ref_data utm_source)

class PostsController < ApplicationController
  before_action :set_custom_attributes, only: [:index]
  # Your logic here
  protected
  def set_custom_attributes
    intercom_custom_data.user[:ref_data] = params[:api_ref_data]
    intercom_custom_data.user[:utm_source] = params[:api_utm_source]
  end
end

Companies

By default, Intercom treats all Users as unrelated individuals. If for example you know users are part of a company, you can group them as such.

Read more about it here

Basic usage is as follows - in config/initializers/intercom.rb

config.company.current = Proc.new { current_company }

current_company is the method/variable that contains the user's current company in your controllers.
If you are using devise you should replace current_company with current_user.company in the above code and every time you see 'current_company' in your configuration file.
This will result in injecting the user current company in the widget settings.

and like with Users, you can set custom attribute on companies too:

config.company.custom_data = {
  :number_of_messages => Proc.new { |app| app.messages.count },
  :is_interesting => :is_interesting?
}

Messenger

Intercom includes an in-app messenger which allows a user to read messages and start conversations.

By default Intercom will add a button that opens the messenger to the page. If you want to customize the style of the link that opens the messenger:

config.inbox.style = :custom

With this option enabled, clicks on any element with an id of Intercom will open the messenger. So the simplest option here would be to add something like the following to your layout:

<a id="Intercom">Support</a>

You can customize the CSS selector, by setting

config.inbox.custom_activator = '.intercom-link'

You can read more about configuring the messenger in your applications settings, within Intercom.

Environments

By default Intercom will be automatically inserted in development and production Rails environments. If you would like to specify the environments in which Intercom should be inserted, you can do so as follows:

config.enabled_environments = ["production"]

Manually Inserting the Intercom Javascript

Some situations may require manually inserting the Intercom script tag. If you simply wish to place the Intercom javascript in a different place within the page or, on a page without a closing </body> tag:

<%= intercom_script_tag %>

This will behave exactly the same as the default auto-install. If for whatever reason you can't use auto-install, you can also provide a hash of user data as the first argument. You can also override IntercomRails::Config options such as your api_secret, or widget configuration with a second hash.

<% if logged_in? %>
  <%= intercom_script_tag({
    :app_id => 'your-app-id',
    :user_id => current_user.id,
    :email => current_user.email,
    :name => current_user.name,
    :created_at => current_user.created_at,
    :custom_data => {
      'plan' => current_user.plan.name
    }
  }) %>
<% end %>

<% if logged_in? %>
  <%= intercom_script_tag({
    :app_id => 'your-app-id',
    :user_id => current_user.id,
    :email => current_user.email,
    :name => current_user.name,
    :created_at => current_user.created_at
  }, {
    :secret => 'your-apps-api-secret',
    :widget => {:activator => '#Intercom'}
  }) %>
<% end %>

Content Security Policy Level 2 (CSP) support

As of version 0.2.30 this gem supports CSP, allowing you to whitelist the include code using both nonces and SHA-256 hashes.

Automatic Insertion

CSP support for automatic insertion exposes two namespaces that can be defined by the user via monkey patching:

  • String CoreExtensions::IntercomRails::AutoInclude.csp_nonce_hook(controller)
  • nil CoreExtensions::IntercomRails::AutoInclude.csp_sha256_hook(controller, SHA-256 whitelist entry)

For instance, a CSP nonce can be inserted using the Twitter Secure Headers gem with the following code:

module CoreExtensions
  module IntercomRails
    module AutoInclude
      def self.csp_nonce_hook(controller)
        SecureHeaders.content_security_policy_script_nonce(controller.request)
      end
    end
  end
end

module CoreExtensions
  module IntercomRails
    module AutoInclude
      def self.csp_sha256_hook(controller, sha256)
        SecureHeaders.append_content_security_policy_directives(controller.request, {script_src: [sha256]})
      end
    end
  end
end

Manual Insertion

CSP is supported in manual insertion as well, the request nonce can be passed as an option:

<% if logged_in? %>
  <%= intercom_script_tag({
    :app_id => 'your-app-id',
    :user_id => current_user.id,
    :email => current_user.email,
    :name => current_user.name,
    :created_at => current_user.created_at
  }, {
    :secret => 'your-apps-api-secret',
    :widget => {:activator => '#Intercom'},
    :nonce => get_nonce_from_your_csp_framework
  }) %>
<% end %>

The SHA-256 hash is available using csp_sha256 just after generating the tag itself 

<%= intercom_script_tag %>
<% add_entry_to_csp_whitelist(intercom_script_tag.csp_sha256) %>

Running tests/specs

Specs should run on a clean clone of this repo, using the following commands. (developed against ruby 2.1.2 and 1.9.3)

bundle install
bundle exec rake spec
#or
bundle exec rspec spec/

Contributors

  • Dr Nic Williams (@drnic) - provided a rails generator for adding the Intercom javascript tag into your layout.
  • Alexander Chaychuk (@sashich) - fixed bug in user detection when users not persisted (e.g. new session view with devise).

License

intercom-rails is released under the MIT License.

Copyright

Copyright (c) 2011-2012 Intercom, Inc. All rights reserved.

Updated over 7 years ago