What is Soul?

Soul is an authentication and a user relationships service built into one. It is meant to abstract some of the most important parts of a social media platform (i.e. user connections, relationships and authentication) into a separate service so that it can be shared across different social media platforms as long as they are using soul to authenticate and build user connections.

The Philosophy

We believe that connections and reputation are what defines a person, user or a soul in the cyberspace (maybe in the real world too 🤔).

This service attempts to outsource some parts of a social media platform. Newer platforms can be created and maintained without having to start from a fresh user base. On the other hand, Soul members would not have to start from scratch in an entirely new social media platform as they would be able to transfer their connections across all platforms which uses Soul to authenticate. You'll be moving across different worlds/ dimensions while preserving your soul!

TLDR

Don't let Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and Reddit monopolize the social media space, start your own platform!

Installation

Set up node using nvm and use project specific npm (optional)

nvm use

npm -g install npm@8.12.1

run MySQL

docker run --name soul-mysql -e MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=root_password -d -p 3306:3306 mysql:latest

set up database

docker exec -it soul-mysql mysql -u root -p

mysql> CREATE DATABASE soul_db_dev CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_bin;

mysql> CREATE DATABASE soul_db_test CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_bin;

install npm packages

npm install

run migrations (on soul_db_dev database)

DATABASE_URL="<YOUR_DATABASE_URL>" npm run migration:run

run Mailhog

docker run -d -p 1025:1025 -p 8025:8025 --name mailhog mailhog/mailhog

run Redis

docker run -d -p 6379:6379 --name redis redis

Running the service locally

local development

npm run start

watch mode

npm run start:dev

production mode

npm run start:prod

Repl mode

npm run start -- --entryFile repl

Tests

unit tests

npm run test

e2e tests

npm run test:e2e

test coverage

npm run test:cov

Overriding env variables

Soul defaults to .env.development while running the app and .env.test while running tests by default. To override these, please specify your overrides in new .env.development.local and .env.test.local files.

Troubleshooting

Module can't be found despite being specified correctly

This can sometimes happen when the dist file is built incorrectly. To resolve this, simply delete the dist file located in the root directory and run npm run start again.