Running in Development Mode

Development mode makes it easier to set up and customize JamComments on your local machine. When your environment is set to anything other than “production”, two helpful things happen:

What Development Mode Does

1. Dummy Comments Appear

Instead of fetching real comments from the server, you’ll see a set of example comments. These are just placeholders to help you see how the comment form and existing comments will look on your site. The actual content doesn’t matter — it’s there so you can style and position everything correctly before going live.

2. Comments Are Silently Submitted

When you submit a test comment, it will look like it worked — the form will clear, and you’ll see a success message. But nothing actually gets saved, no emails are sent, and no webhooks trigger. This lets you test the comment submission flow without cluttering your real data.

How to Enable Development Mode

Most JamComments integrations automatically detect your environment, but you can also set it explicitly:

Example: Remix

const markup = await fetchMarkup({
  domain: process.env.JAM_COMMENTS_DOMAIN as string,
  apiKey: process.env.JAM_COMMENTS_API_KEY as string,
  path: `/posts/${params.slug}`,
  environment: process.env.NODE_ENV, // "development" or "production"
});

Example: Bridgetown

Bridgetown.configure do |config|
  init :bridgetown_jam_comments
    domain "your.domain.com"
    api_key "123-api-key"
    environment "production" # or "development"
  end
end

Example: Astro

astro.config.js

import { defineConfig } from "astro/config";
import { jamComments } from "@jam-comments/astro/config";
import "dotenv/config";

export default defineConfig({
  integrations: [
    jamComments({
      domain: process.env.JAM_COMMENTS_DOMAIN,
      apiKey: process.env.JAM_COMMENTS_API_KEY,
      environment: "production" // or "development"
    }),
  ],
});

How Environment Detection Works

If you don’t explicitly set an environment, each integration will try to figure it out:

• Jekyll: Falls back to JEKYLL_ENV
• Node-based integrations (Next.js, Remix, etc.): Uses process.env.NODE_ENV
• Bridgetown: Uses BRIDGETOWN_ENV

When the environment is “production”, real comments are fetched and submissions are actually saved.