Rationale

Communicating with Signal's Sticker API can be somewhat non-trivial because it uses encrypted protocol buffers. Raw responses must be decrypted using some rather esoteric cryptography, resulting in a high-friction experience for the average developer. This package aims to make using the Stickers API as straightforward as possible by providing a small set of utility functions that work in both the browser and Node.

Install

npm i @signalstickers/stickers-client

Use

It is assumed that users of this package have a general understanding of how stickers work in Signal. For more information on that topic, see this article.

This package can be used in both browser and Node. If you plan to use it in the browser, make sure you are using a bundler that supports the browser package.json field.

Because sticker packs in Signal are immutable, a response from Signal (be it for a sticker pack or an individual sticker) can be safely cached indefinitely. As such, this package implements a basic in-memory cache, so you should not need to implement caching or memoization yourself. ✨

API

This package has the following named exports:

async getStickerPackManifest(
  id: string,
  key: string
) => Promise<StickerPackManifest>

Provided a sticker pack ID and its key, returns a promise that resolves with the sticker pack's decrypted manifest.

async getStickerInPack(
  id: string,
  key: string,
  stickerId: number,
  encoding? = 'raw' | 'base64'
) => Promise<Uint8Array | string>

Provided a sticker pack ID, its key, and a sticker ID, returns a promise that resolves with the raw WebP image data for the indicated sticker.

An optional encoding parameter may be provided to indicate the desired return type. The default value of raw will return raw WebP data as a Uint8 Array. This is useful if further processing of the image data is necessary. Alternatively, if base64 is provided, a data-URI string will be returned instead. This string can be used directly as the src attribute in an <img> tag, for example.

async getEmojiForSticker(
  id: string,
  key: string,
  stickerId: number
) => Promise<string>

Provided a sticker pack ID, its key, and sticker ID, returns the emoji associated with the sticker.

Example

In this example, we'll create a simple React component that will render a single sticker. It will accept a sticker pack's ID and key as well as the ID of the sticker to render as props. We will use a one-time effect when the component mounts to fetch the image.

Note that this package caches responses from Signal, so we don't need to add any additional logic to store the result of getStickerInPack outside the component's state. If it is ever dismounted and remounted in the future with the same props, no additional network requests will be made.

import React from 'react';
import { getStickerInPack, getEmojiForSticker } from '@signalstickers/stickers-client';

export interface Props {
  packId: string;
  packKey: string;
  stickerId: number;
}

export default function Sticker({ packId, packKey, stickerId }: Props) {
  const [stickerData, setStickerData] = React.useState();
  const [stickerEmoji, setStickerEmoji] = React.useState();

  React.useEffect(() => {
    getStickerInPack(packId, packKey, stickerId, 'base64').then(setStickerData);
    getEmojiForSticker(packId, packKey, stickerId).then(setStickerEmoji);
  }, [packId, packKey, stickerId]);

  if (!stickerData || !stickerEmoji) return null;

  return (
    <img src={stickerData} alt={stickerEmoji} />
  );
};

This component could then be used thusly:

import Sticker from './Sticker';


export default () => {
  // This will render an image tag containing the indicated sticker.
  return (
    <Sticker
      packId="7be8291c4007cc73868818992596cc24"
      packKey="ca808607b39f0f1d860a8460128d3ba4022fb0536ddadf58f7e8ff8ac7ddaf56"
      stickerId={1}
    >
  )
}