Microbloggy

A Rust-based microblogger.

Building and running

You will need the following environment variables to build and run:

export ADMIN_USERNAME=testuser
export ADMIN_PASSWORD=testpassword
export SESSION_SECRET=session-secret-atleast-32-chars
export DATABASE_URL=sqlite:path-to-db-used-for-migration.sqlite
export UPLOADS_PATH=uploads

# Ensure testing sqlite database exists
$ cargo install sqlx-cli  --no-default-features --features sqlite
$ sqlx database create
$ sqlx migrate run

# Build and run
$ cargo run

# Run tests (note that this uses the same database as DATABASE_URL, so be careful)
$ cargo test

TODO

Building:

• Use Sqlx for database migrations
• Use Makefile or other solution to ensure that the database exists already
  • Somewhat mitigated by using create_if_not_exists in the sqlite pool options
• Add additional tests for post flow
• Build and test Dockerfile
  • Dockerfile uses Ubuntu for builder and runner because I was having some Glibc compatibility issues using rust as the builder
• Load testing on large databases (is it HN proof)
  • Ish? Getting 350 requests per second with Siege on a 1 Cpu Digitalocean VM which is fast enough but maybe slower than I would hope for how simple it is. Is generating a CSRF token per page load the performance issue?

Internals

• Middleware for authentication verification instead of boilerplate session checks
• Middlware for CSRF validation
• Use VueJS and Rollup

Features:

• Customize User Profile
• Actual error message when the login credentials are wrong
• Allow editing and deleting posts
• Allow setting a short friend URL for posts for sharing reasons
• Make some colors customizable
• Allow uploading and resizing photos
• Support multiple users
• Show multiple pages of posts
• Show local times and dates based on users browser (render UTC in HTML)
• Scale textareas based on size
  • This is kind of implemented but isn't very dynamic and is a bit hardcoded
• Post Drafts (automatically create drafts and load them on page load)