offen/consent repository overview

⁠

⁠consent

Zero-overhead consent tooling

consent aims to be a lightweight solution for managing user consent on websites. Its most important design goals are:

• no server side persistence of consent decisions
• no need to assign user identifiers or similar, meaning no additional tracking vectors
• consent decisions are secured from interference of 3rd party scripts
• users can revoke their consent decisions and any traces at any time by clearing their cookies or using the provided UI
• operators can customize the UI elements in use to match their design

consent is a good option in case you want to:

• load 3rd party content like Twitter or Instagram widgets with user consent
• request users' consent for collecting usage statistics
• keep your data footprint as low as possible by never storing any data about consent decisions yourselves

consent does not aim to be a drop-in "handle-GDPR-requirements-for-me" solution. Operators that deploy consent are expected to follow regulations that apply themselves. Ideally, it also acts as a motivation for thinking about what data you really need to collect and which third party services are really required to run your site.

consent requires you to be able to configure deploy a simple web server to a dedicated domain. Linux binaries and a Docker image are provided, or you can build the server for any other platform. If needed, it can automatically acquire SSL certificates.

consent can also be used as a library and be integrated into any web server written in Golang.

Documentation on how to install and run the consent tool is found in the docs⁠ section.

⁠Quickstart

Deploy the application to a domain like consent.example.com. On the host site www.example.com, embed the client script:

<script src="https://consent.example.com/client.js">

which exposed window.ConsentClient. In your client side code, construct a new client instance pointing at your deployment and request user consent for the desired scope(s):

const client = new window.ConsentClient({ url: 'https://consent.example.com' })
client
  .acquire('analytics', 'marketing')
  .then((decisions) => {
    if (decisions.analytics) {
      // load analytics data
    }
    if (decisions.marketing) {
      // trigger marketing tools
    }
  })

⁠Building the binary/images yourself

By default, a linux-x86_64 binary is provided for all releases. If you need to build a binary for a different platform you can install Go 1.18 or greater, clone the repository and run

make

which will put the binary in a bin directory shortly.

Docker images are provided for amd64, arm64 and arm/v7, building for other targets is possible via:

docker buildx build --platform <your_target> -t offen/offen:<your_tag> .

⁠Development setup

To run the development setup, make sure you have make, Docker and docker-compose installed.

Clone the repository and start the development server:

git clone [email protected]:offen/consent.git
cd consent
make up

This gives you a consent server running on port 9000 and a test environment that embeds the script running on port 9001.