beango

README

Beango Messenger

Beango is a messaging app built using Golang and HTMX.

Approach

Minimal dependencies

This project uses the bare minimum dependencies, so a lot of things are custom-built from scratch. This does add quite a lot of effort to development, but should provide the benefit of making things more transparent, flexible, and lightweight.

Adhere to HTMX principles

HTMX was chosen to build to web front end for this app in order to try a different approach to web development. We want state to be managed in a single place, the server. Therefore, we use as little javascript code as possible, and leverage HTMX's features to keep most front end logic in the DOM itself.

How to run

With Docker (recommended)

Prequisite: Docker must be installed on your machine

1. Clone config/default.docker.env and rename the copy to docker.env.
2. Set BG_DB_PASSWORD to a value of your choice. This will be the password used for postgres users.
3. Run docker-compose up.

Without Docker

Prerequisites: Golang, Postgres

1. Create and run your postgres database, set up roles and priviledges as necessary.
2. Clone config/default.docker.env and rename the copy to dev.env.
3. Change the BG_DB_USERNAME and BG_DB_PASSWORD envars to match your postgres user. You can also just remove these if you want to use the default postgres user with no password.
4. Run set -a; source config/dev.env; set +a; to make the envars available to the current shell.
5. Run go run main.go