Topical

Topical is a (very) minimalist message board built with Golang.

Users can create topics and reply with mesages. Users need only to pick an avatar color and two initials to get a signature and start posting.

Topical even supports dark mode. The preferred color scheme from your OS settings is used to decide which theme to display (update your OS setting to see!).

Running Topical

The simplest way to run Topical is using Docker. Please ensure you have both Docker and Docker Compose installed, then do the following:

1. Clone this repo
2. Navigate into the repo
3. Run docker-compose up
4. Navigate to localhost:8000 in your browser. Done!

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Development

Please ensure you have both Docker and Docker Compose installed, then do the following:

1. Clone this repo
2. Navigate into the repo
3. Run docker-compose up db
4. In another terminal window, in the repo directory also run:

go run ./cmd/topical \
  -db-connection-uri='postgresql://topical:topical@localhost?sslmode=disable' \
  -session-key=somethingSecret

5. Navigate to localhost:8000 in your browser. Done!

You can change Topical's code locally and re-run the go run command to restart the server.

Running Tests

• Run tests by executing go test ./internal/....
• You can also get coverage information with the -cover flag (go test ./... -cover)
• Note: Integration-style tests may take longer to execute than unit tests as they involve setup and teardown phases.

Options/Flags

Topical supports passing options via flag at start up or through an accompanying environment variable. Flags will take precedence over environment variables, if provided.

Flag	ENV var	Default Fallback	Description
p	PORT	8000	Port for Topical to bind to
database-url	DATABASE_URL	'not-set'	URI-formatted Postgres connection information (e.g. postgresql://localhost:5433...)
session-key	SESSION_KEY	'not-set'	Session key for cookie store

Database Management

A few DB management scripts have been provided and will accomplish the following tasks:

Script	Use
db_init	Creates the intial tables in the DB as specified in ./schema.sql
db_seed	Seeds an existing database with data from ./seeds.sql
db_drop	Drops tables from a Topical database
db_reset	Drops tables, creates tables, reseeds database

Scripts can be run directly with go run but require passing a -database-url (if the environment variable is not set):

go run ./scripts/db_init \
  -database-url='postgresql://topical:topical@localhost?sslmode=disable'