Gavin's Blog Site

A blog application written in C# and ASP.NET Core.

Live demo

blog.peasenet.com

Features

• Easy to use and deploy.
• Text editing is done in the browser via TinyMCE.
• Blog posts are stored in a SQL database.
• Image upload.
• Docker support.
• A basic search engine to search through titles and content.

Building

Installing ASP.NET Core

Linux

I developed this application using Ubuntu 20.04 via WSL2. I folowed the instructions listed here to install ASP.NET Core on Ubuntu 20.04. Please note that other versions of linux are supported by ASP.NET Core, and thus this application will work on other linux distros.

Windows & MacOS

You can install ASP.NET Core here and follow the instructions to install dotnet and asp.net on your computer.

Building the application (binary)

Building the application is trivial. I used the command line to build the application.

dotnet build

This will build the application and place binaries in the BlogSite/bin/Debug/net6.0 directory.

Running the application

Running the application is also trivial. Just navigate to the BlogSite directory and run the application.

cd BlogSite/bin/Debug/net6.0
dotnet BlogSite.dll

This will create a few files on startup - app.db, posts.db, and a "Media" directory.

Adding an admin user

At this present moment, there is two roles - an Admin role which allows users to post, and a default role. The administrator user is seeded into the database on startup. The default administrator credentials are:

Username: admin@admin.com
Password: Admin123!

Docker support

You can build the application using Docker.

docker build -t blogsite -f BlogSite/Dockerfile .

After building the image, you can run the application. It is recommended to create two directories somewhere for the application to store data - one for the databases, and one for the media.

Creating the directories

mkdir ~/blogsite-media
mkdir ~/blogsite-db

Running the application via docker

docker run -v ~/blogsite-db:/db -v ~/blogsite-media:/app/Media -p 80:80 -d --name blogsite blogsite

Using a prebuilt docker image.

Each commit to the master branch will have a docker image automatically created (rolling release style). You can use the current image by running the following command.

docker pull gcpease/blogsite:latest

After running this command, you can run the application.

 docker run -v ~/blogsite-db:/db -v ~/blogsite-media:/app/Media -dp 7160:80 --name blogsite gcpease/blogsite:latest

Updating the prebuild docker image.

To update the docker image, run the following commands.

docker stop blogsite
docker rm blogsite
docker pull gcpease/blogsite:latest
docker run -v ~/blogsite-db:/db -v ~/blogsite-media:/app/Media -dp 7160:80 --name blogsite gcpease/blogsite:latest

Future Features

• Better role management.
• A draft system.
• Comments.
• Tagging.

Things to work on

• XSS prevention
• Post content and title sanitization.
• A better way to store/render images/media.

Background

Why would I develop another CMS?

If you have been following my development for a few years now, you might have notice dthat I have written a new blogging system about once a year. With each iteration, I have added more features and have tinkered with a different language. My first CMS originally started out from a static HTML page that was generated by a bash script, which evolved to a system that used MySQL and PHP. This system worked, but there were a lot of flaws with using PHP, and flaws within the software itself. I decided to write a new system that was more flexible and easier to use, as well as more secure. This led to the creation of this CMS which is powered by ASP.NET Core, C#, and Sqlite. This will hopefully be my last iteration of a blog system, and I hope to continue to add more features to it. This CMS has proven to be a fun challenge, as well as a practical application of knowledge I have gained from classes I have taken.

Why C#?

I have always been interested in C#, and I have always had a strong interest in ASP.NET Core. I have used C# in the past for some school assignments and enjoyed it. I've wanted to learn how to use ASP.NET Core and the MVC architecture for quite some time, so this made C# an excellent choice.