tohray - microblogging application in nim

ತೊರೆ, pronounced "toh-ray" (with a dental 't' sound),
is a microblogging application to capture stream of thoughts inspired by Linus Lee's Stream

The word ತೊರೆ in Kannada has multiple meanings, but most commonly
as rivulet, forego, divest; which are indeed appropriate description for the intent.

You can see this in action at https://tohray.fly.dev; the source code is on github.com/btbytes/tohray

Features

• Write new posts
• In markdown
• Edit posts
• Delete posts
• Click on the date to see posts written during that month.
• Supports multiple users, but I really wrote it for one user.
• You can allow users to sign up by giving them the inviteCode
• Export all the feeds from /export endpoint.
  • default format is JSON
  • append ?format=md to export in markdown format ie., /export?format=md. The entries are returned with a File Seperator (ASCII 28) after each entry.
• Calendar view by month at /calendar to see all the posts belonging to a month.

Non-Features

• There is no "user management".
• There is no "password reset".

Technology Details

Linus wrote his stream app using a language he created himself - Oaklang.
I wanted an excuse to use Nim for something "useful", so I used Nim, and it was a great experience.

Nim is a fast, and friendly language that is statically typed, while looking like Python in Syntax.
It compiles the source code into C (or C++, or Javascript), which allows the programs written in it
to be very fast, small, and quite portable.

• Programming Language: Nim
• Framework: Prologue, which in turn uses Karax.
• Database: SQLite
• CSS: Terminal
• Cloud: Tested on https://fly.io
• Editor: eh.. didn't know you cared, but it was written on Zed which has decent support for editing Nim with nimlangserver.

Programming Notes

• The views.nim file way too long, but I'm not ashamed of it. It's app I wrote for myself, and it fits into myhead perfectly fine.
• The decision to compile secrets into the binary was made after realizing that managing secrets in the environment, .env files, consts.nim .. multiple places is just busy work. Not how I would write a "production" application.. but this is a "hobby" application. And, whatever makes me happy to keep writing code will remain.

Installation

• Clone this directory
• Have nim installed on your computer
• copy example-consts.nim to consts.nim and set the variables
• NOTE: The config is compiled into the binary. There is no "config file"
• Compile the app with $ nim compile toray.nim
• Launch the program with ./tohray, and the program will start on port :8080 - http://localhost:8080
• Go to http://localhost:8080/register (not visible on the web page itself)
• Use the inviteCode you set in consts.nim along with your name and password
• Click on Write to start writing. I recomment writing a post with slug about so that the about link on the top nav actually goes to the about page.
• The data is stored in a sqlite databse given in the consts.nim file
• NOTE: if you want to see how the blog looks with some entries in it, you can run sqlite3 tohray.db < test.sql to see some lorem ipsum content.

Installation on fly.io

I wrote this so that I can run it fly.io. Study the Dockerfile and fly.toml.

Observe how I copy fly-consts.nim to consts.nim in the Dockerfile. This allows you to have a
local copy (on the computer) with the secrets etc, but will be compiled into the binary on deployment.

To create the volume where the database is stored (/mnt/db in fly.toml), you have to use this
command: fly volumes create db -r atl. Here, atl stands for Atlanta, where I launched the app.
The app and the volume should be in the same zone.

Todo

• [x] Export all the posts in a JSON file (and markdown)
• [x] Add a calendar view
• [x] Edit Posts. Don't hold your breath
• [x] Add calendar and export links
• [x] RSS Feed
• [ ] Fix Broken Search
• [ ] Fix "Next Page" and "Previous Page" navigation
• [ ] Implement /import
• [ ] Deploy on other PaaS platforms like unicraft etc.
• [ ] Make a static build of this docker image. Currently, it is using a full sized Ubuntu Normal image. bleh.
• [ ] Make it Apple podcast compatible