element-web/docs/customisations.md

Customisations

Element Web and the React SDK support "customisation points" that can be used to easily add custom logic specific to a particular deployment of Element Web.

An example of this is the security customisations module. This module in the React SDK only defines some empty functions and their types: it does not do anything by default.

To make use of these customisation points, you will first need to fork Element Web so that you can add your own code. Even though the default module is part of the React SDK, you can still override it from the Element Web layer:

1. Copy the default customisation module to element-web/src/customisations/YourNameSecurity.ts
2. Edit customisations points and make sure export the ones you actually want to activate
3. Tweak the Element build process to use the customised module instead of the default by adding this to the additionalPlugins array in webpack.config.js:

new webpack.NormalModuleReplacementPlugin(
    /src[\/\\]customisations[\/\\]Security\.ts/,
    path.resolve(__dirname, 'src/customisations/YourNameSecurity.ts'),
),

If we add more customisation modules in the future, we'll likely improve these steps to remove the need for build changes like the above.

By isolating customisations to their own module, this approach should remove the chance of merge conflicts when updating your fork, and thus simplify ongoing maintenance.