A simple yet somehow overdesigned guestbook system featuring a simple control panel
This is phase I of the personal backscratchers project.
- 📝 Table of Contents
- 🧐 About
- 📑 Documentation
- 🏁 Getting Started
- 🕸️ Prerequisites
- 🚀 Deployment
- ⛏️ Built Using
- ✍️ Authors
Guestbooky proposes something slightly deviating from the usual guestbook taken from 1998: while we gladly accept your messages, thank you very much, reading them is limited to the receiver. I mean, of course they can show them to others should they want-
That means it is something useful for engaged couples and other folks with a moment or two to set everything up. I really need to get my hands dirty from time to time, so I figured I'd make a guestbook for my marriage hotsite. And make everyone else see this code.
It includes many concepts that are very reasonable to tinker with as learning material, in a bite-sized project complexity that allows me to talk about it without losing the breadcrumb trail.
Comments and general documentation/musings on the project
These instructions will get you a copy of the project up and running on your local machine for development and testing purposes. See deployment for notes on how to deploy the project on a live system.
For running it locally:
- .NET 8.0
- A running instance of MongoDB
- A Cloudflare turnstile secret key for the captcha
- Not forgetting to set up environment variables
There's a .env.template file with all environment variables used throughout the compose file.
Important
You will need to set them up either by hand or by using your IDE's capabilities. On Visual Studio, that can be done via the Debug Properties of Guestbooky.API.
| Env Variable Keys | Usage |
|---|---|
| CORS_ORIGINS, ACCESS_* | Variables related to JWT issuing and checking. In order to use the GET and DELETE endpoints for the messages, you need to use a bearer token. |
| CLOUDFLARE_SECRET | The turnstile secret, used in the server portion of the captcha check. |
| MONGODB_* | Related to the connection to MongoDB. Yeah. |
| LOG_* | Logging. |
| GUESTBOOKY_ | Related to accessing the main document collection, which uses its own user. |
Tip
For local usage of the backend, you can use docker-compose.local.yml which provides just what you need to run the backend yourself.
The admin panel is a simple React app built through Vite.
If you haven't done so, the prerequisites are:
- Node v18+
- NPM or any other package manager
- Vite
Using nvm should make things straightforward enough for your environment if you don't have Node up yet. Then do the usual npm i (or equivalent) in the Admin Panel's src/Guestbooky-admin folder and such to get the packages, which should include Vite.
For development, it should be enough to run vite in Guestbooky-admin's src folder.
Use docker-compose.public.yml as a basis, and remember to have a .env file ready. it should create the image for you and start running.
In order to create a live version, adjust the API_URL path in Guestbooky-admin/src/environment/constants.js, and execute vite build. The application will be prepared and sent to src/Guestbooky-admin/dist. Send to your hosting solution and you should be good.
Mongodump is run as a cron job daily. The behavior is customizable in docker-compose.yml
- MongoDB - Database
- .NET - Backend
- React/Vite - Admin Panel
- Cloudflare Turnstile - Captcha