Start Here Farcaster Composer Actions / MiniApps
How do you develop on top of the Farcaster protocol? Dive in. Focus is on giving you just as much documentation as needed as well as conceptual overviews and examples. We link out to detailed project documentation where used.
What are Composer Actions?
First a Composer is what you see when you are writing a new post. You compose your post.
While traditional social media lets you add Media (Videos, Images, GIF, …) and Text with Composer Actions you can do anything!
How?
While writing your text and adding media with Composer Actions any third party app that produces a social media post at the end comes straight to you!
This means spell checking, media search (GIF search, Meme generators, Image picker, your Media cloud, AI assistance, …) all can be accessed within the app.
Notice the three colorful items at the bottom here? These are buttons to open the composer action.
The process of getting your text spell checked now becomes clicking the button, opening the webpage of the tool you use and saying yes while maybe picking some options.
From there you are right back into the cast composer with an updated text (channel, and potentially media added).
What can we do with it?
We are NOT limited to just build some helper to reformat or add to social media posts! The way it works is you can load any webpage.
I would encourage you to make sure the webpage is responsive and works well on very small screens, but outside that anything goes.
You can build a game that runs when the action is loaded and then shares the Highscore of your session on Social Media right away.
You can order food and get a discount by sharing the order.
Or you can just use anything from your social feed, close it and keep browsing.
Mini Apps are here to stay.
How to build Composer Actions?
What is the difference between Farcaster Frames and Mini Apps?
In Frames each time the user performs a button click that is sent to the server and the server has to return a new Frame. Imagine refreshing a webpage each time you press something.
With Mini Apps you are shown a webpage. That webpage can also run on your device so you don’t need to wait for the refresh to load.
Additionally one can do much more with a mini app than with a Frame that is limited to four buttons, an input field and an image (or GIF) being shown. A mini app being a webpage means it could very well be a crossplattform app that just happens to also work as mini app. Imagine writing code once for the mobile phones as well as the web and then using that web version to also use it as mini app. That is the true meaning of being wherever your user is at.
What features does a Mini App have, that a Frame does not?
A mini app can play sound to the user, a frame can only show an image or GIF.
A mini app can play videos, which a Frame can’t.
A mini app can also have more then 4 buttons as it depends on how you build your website.
To read more about the differences between Frames and mini apps read the full comparison