Emojis

GitLab supports native Emojis through the tanuki_emoji gem.

How to update Emojis

Because our emoji support is implemented on both the backend and the frontend, we need to update support over three milestones.

First milestone (backend)

  1. Update the tanuki_emoji gem as needed.
  2. Update the Gemfile to use the latest tanuki_emoji gem.
  3. Update the Gemfile to use the latest unicode-emoji that supports the version of Unicode you’re upgrading to.
  4. Update EMOJI_VERSION in lib/gitlab/emoji.rb
  5. bundle exec rake tanuki_emoji:import - imports all fallback images into the versioned public/-/emojis directory. Ensure you see new individual images copied into there.
  6. When testing, you should be able to use the shortcodes of any new emojis and have them display.
  7. See example MRs one and two for the backend.

Second milestone (frontend)

  1. Update EMOJI_VERSION in app/assets/javascripts/emoji/index.js
  2. Use the tanuki_emoji gem’s Rake tasks to update aliases, digests, and sprites. Run in the following order:

    1. bundle exec rake tanuki_emoji:aliases - updates fixtures/emojis/aliases.json

    2. bundle exec rake tanuki_emoji:digests - updates public/-/emojis/VERSION/emojis.json and fixtures/emojis/digests.json

    3. bundle exec rake tanuki_emoji:sprite - creates new sprite sheets

      If new emoji are added, the sprite sheet may change size. To compensate for such changes, first generate the app/assets/images/emoji.png sprite sheet with the above Rake task, then check the dimensions of the new sprite sheet and update the SPRITESHEET_WIDTH and SPRITESHEET_HEIGHT constants in lib/tasks/tanuki_emoji.rake accordingly. Then re-run the task.

      • Use ImageOptim or similar program to optimize the images for size
  3. Ensure new sprite sheets were generated for 1x and 2x
    • app/assets/images/emoji.png
    • app/assets/images/emoji@2x.png
  4. Update fixtures/emojis/intents.json with any new emoji that we would like to highlight as having positive or negative intent.
    • Positive intent should be set to 0.5.
    • Neutral intent can be set to 1. This is applied to all emoji automatically so there is no need to set this explicitly.
    • Negative intent should be set to 1.5.
  5. You might need to add new emoji Unicode support checks and rules for platforms that do not support a certain emoji and we need to fallback to an image. See app/assets/javascripts/emoji/support/is_emoji_unicode_supported.js and app/assets/javascripts/emoji/support/unicode_support_map.js
  6. Ensure you use the version of emoji-regex that corresponds to the version of Unicode that is being supported. This should be updated in package.json. Used for filtering emojis in app/assets/javascripts/emoji/index.js.
  7. Have there been any changes to the category names? If so then app/assets/javascripts/emoji/constants.js will need to be updated
  8. When testing
    1. Ensure you can see the new emojis and their aliases in the GitLab Flavored Markdown (GLFM) Autocomplete
    2. Ensure you can see the new emojis and their aliases in the emoji reactions menu

Third milestone (cleanup)

Remove any old emoji versions from the public/-/emojis directory. This is not strictly necessary - everything continues to work if you don’t do this. However it’s good to clean it up.