Diarist

Journaling made simple.

Diarist is an app to help you update your Journal directly from Whatsapp.

How it works:

1. Create an account by providing your phone number

2. You'll receive a whatsapp message from us asking you `How was your day today?`. Just reply to it and we'll save your response.

3. Once you feel like reading some of your old entries you can go to the webapp or consume from the rest API to get your messages formatted and time-stamped. It will also continue to send you a text every day so that you don't forget to update your diary.

About the app

A "Diarist" is a person who writes a diary. This app lets you send your journal updates via Whatsapp and view them on your browser. Note that:

• It is my entry for the Twilio x DEV hackathon.
• It is based on the java Spark framework. Heavily influenced by the appointment reminders app example from Twilio.

If you are curious about the future, inspirations or the process of building this you can check out the docs.

How to run it

Start your mysql instance

docker-compose -f src/main/resources/docker/docker-compose.yml up -d

Run migrations

mvn clean compile exec:java -Dexec.mainClass=com.diarist.journal.Migrator

Execute the app

mvn clean compile exec:java -Dexec.mainClass=com.diarist.journal.Server -Dexec.cleanupDaemonThreads=false

Instalation guide

1. Configure environment variables for all the properties that don't have a default value.
2. Make sure you have an instance of MySQL running. There's a docker-compose on the resources directory that can be useful.
3. Create a schema for the app. Should be called diarist_test unless DATABASE_SCHEMA is set
4. Run migrations with the maven command
5. Execute the app

Available properties

Mysql

Property Name	Default Value
DATABASE_USER	diarist
DATABASE_PASS	diary
DATABASE_HOST	localhost
DATABASE_PORT	3306
DATABASE_SCHEMA	diarist_test

Twilio

Property Name	Default Value
TWILIO_AUTH_TOKEN
TWILIO_ACCOUNT_SID
TWILIO_NUMBER

App settings

Property Name	Default Value
APP_PORT	4567
ENABLE_API	false

Local developement

• In order to receive a user's message, you'll need make your computer accessible from the internet with ngrok.
• You need to provide a MySQL instance on your local environment.