The Church Web Platform

A template-less golang Content Management System (CMS) based on the Echo web framework (https://github.com/labstack/echo) and SQLBoiler (https://github.com/vattle/sqlboiler) and an innovative, think-outside-the-box golang architecture.

Intro

The project started from the need to build a sustainable website for a small church pastored by a friend. The site needed to allow admins to maintain events, sermons, and articles. Here's a temporary link to that site: http://www.calvaryeastmetro.com

• The start of commit history here represents 1.5 years of previous work - so this sits on top of a great amount of innovation and effort, yet this is just the beginning...
• Note: while I feel the project, once configured is production ready, please use at your own discretion.
• Note also that over the next couple months there may be some change to the architecture.
• The project will adopt semantic versioning very soon

Architecture

• The Echo web framework (https://github.com/labstack/echo) was chosen because of its maturity and simplicity - hey, and speed too
• Postgres is our main database. SQLBoiler provides a code-generated, thus compiled and performant database interface layer
• Redis provides our session and (soon) our caching store
• Template - none. This is a code-first platform (anyone here love Go?), as such HTML is generated by Go, simply, with github.com/rohanthewiz/element.
• Glide is used for dependency management - why? It still works great while we wait for the dust to settle from the transition from Dep to Vgo.
• Sermons are uploaded to the server then copied by a goroutine to an ftp site.
• Images uploaded via the online editor are resized then stored locally on the server
• Styling - See the Contributing section for the policy on styling - basically do your own, but don't contribute it back so projects can be styled differently.See the example app for an example (coming soon) using [stylus] (http://stylus-lang.com) - my CSS processor of choice.
• BTW Bootstrap is only used in the online editor Summer Note. I therefore limit Bootstrap CSS to just form scope.
• And don't worry, Docker will come. Let's just everything jiving smoothly first.

STOP !!! The platform has drastically changed!

Church is now a Go module, so some of the below may not apply. Give me a bit to update the README. In the meantime see github.com/rohanthewiz/church_example for usage. Thanks!

General Workflow

1. Make a fork of the 'github.com/rohanthewiz/church_example' project and clone your fork to local
2. Check out the master branch
3. Build and run the app: go build; ./app_name

Platform Setup

The project requires

• Go 1.11 or greater
• Postgres around 9.5 or later
• Redis
• VIPS image library (optional - only for image resizing) Note: feel free to use your own deployment strategy. The below is an example install on Ubuntu Linux.

Server Prep

Basically everything is built on the server for now (KISS comes to mind)

• Note: I prefer not to include $GOPATH/bin in my PATH, but rather manually copy executables to ~/bin which I include in my PATH
• Newb:
  1. Create the directory (folder) with mkdir ~/bin
  2. To include ~/bin in your path add a line like this to ~/.profile: PATH="$HOME/bin:$PATH"

Install Go

• Follow install instructions at: https://golang.org/doc/install
• Run go env to see if everything is sane. Mine looks like this:

GOARCH="amd64"
GOBIN=""
GOEXE=""
GOHOSTARCH="amd64"
GOHOSTOS="linux"
GOOS="linux"
GOPATH="/home/myuser/go"
GORACE=""
GOROOT="/home/myuser/apps/go"
GOTOOLDIR="/home/myuser/apps/go/pkg/tool/linux_amd64"
GCCGO="gccgo"
CC="gcc"
GOGCCFLAGS="-fPIC -m64 -pthread -fmessage-length=0 -fdebug-prefix-map=/tmp/go-build264891901=/tmp/go-build -gno-record-gcc-switches"
CXX="g++"
CGO_ENABLED="1"
CGO_CFLAGS="-g -O2"
CGO_CPPFLAGS=""
CGO_CXXFLAGS="-g -O2"
CGO_FFLAGS="-g -O2"
CGO_LDFLAGS="-g -O2"
PKG_CONFIG="pkg-config"

Install GCC and build tools

• Install gcc and essential build tools (needed for VIPS and glide install): sudo apt-get install build-essential

Install postgres server

• Follow instructions here: https://www.postgresql.org/download/linux/ubuntu/ (Get the server and client tools)
• For passwords to work without known system user, change an entry in /etc/postgresql//main/pg_hba.conf
• In pg_hba.conf, change this line:

local   all             all                                     peer

to:

local   all             all                                     password

• Restart the postgres server sudo service postgresql restart
• Check that the server is running properly with sudo service postgresql status (it should say "online" or similar)
• Go into psql as user postgres sudo -u postgres psql postgres This is one way to login after a fresh reload of postgres.
• Change the postgres user's password with \password postres

Install Redis Server

• Install redis sudo apt install redis-server

Install VIPS

VIPS is used to automatically resize images added to the editor. We most likely don't need all libraries installed below. In fact, VIPS isn't critical to the app - you should lose only the image resizing capability.

### hmm should we just install this from apt?
sudo apt install libvips-dev

### if installing from apt then maybe we don't need all the installs below - to be tested
mkdir ~/libs
cd libs
wget https://github.com/jcupitt/libvips/releases/download/v8.5.9/vips-8.5.9.tar.gz
tar -xf vips-8.5.9.tar.gz
cd vips-8.5.9/
./configure
gcc -v
which pkg-config
sudo apt-get install pkg-config
sudo apt-get install libgmodule2.0-dev
sudo apt-get install libgmodule2.0
sudo apt-get install libexpat-dev
sudo apt-get install libexpat2-dev
sudo apt-get install libexpat2.2.5-dev
sudo apt-get install libexpat2.2-dev
sudo apt-get install libexpat2
sudo apt-get install libexpat-2
sudo apt-get install libexpat2.0
sudo apt-get install libexpat1-dev
sudo apt-get install libpng
sudo apt-get install libpng2
sudo apt install libjpeg-dev
sudo apt install libpng16
sudo apt install libpng16-dev
sudo apt install giflib-dev
sudo apt install libgif-dev
sudo apt install giflib-dbg
sudo apt install libtiff
sudo apt install libtiff5-dev
sudo apt install libpoppler-glib-dev
sudo apt install libpoppler-glib8
sudo apt install librsvg2-dev
sudo apt install librsvg2
sudo apt install librsvg2-2
sudo apt install libexif-dev
./configure
make
sudo make install
vips -v
cd /etc/ld.so.conf.d/
more libc.conf # should include `/usr/local/lib`
sudo ldconfig # update shared libraries
vips -v

Go: Sqlboiler Getting Started - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKmRemtmi0Y

• go get -u -t github.com/vattle/sqlboiler
• go get -u gopkg.in/nullbio/null.v6
• go get -u gopkg.in/inconshreveable/log15.v2
• Once the db is migrated, SQLboiler will generate/ update the model code (in the models directory)
• Copy the sqlboiler binary into place cp $GOPATH/bin/sqlboiler ~/bin/
• Make sure project_root/sqlboiler.toml has proper creds for your postgres database
• From the project root run sqlboiler postgres

App Setup

Migrations

• As the 'posgres' user, create a user with CREATEDB permissions psql -h localhost -p 5432 -d postgres -U postgres -c "create user myuser with password 'secret' CREATEDB"
• Create the database postgres=# CREATE DATABASE "church_development" WITH OWNER "myuser";
• Run goose migrations: first make sure to get and install the goose binary: https://github.com/pressly/goose
• go get -u github.com/pressly/goose/cmd/goose
• Note goose requires that the database is already created
• Change to the migrate directory cd db/migrate
• Migrate up: goose postgres "user=myuser password=secret dbname=church_development sslmode=disable" up
• You can manually migrate each of the sql files (though not recommended) psql -h localhost -d church_development -U myuser -f db/migrate/20170419004813_CreateUsersTable.sql

Configuration

• cp options.yml.sample options.yml
• Update config params: sudo nano cfg/options.yml

Create a Random Seeds file

• Create a file: cfg/random_seeds.txt and populate it with random strings one per line.
• If you are not paranoid about security (you should be) you can just copy from the provided sample file cp cfg/rand_seeds.txt.sample cfg/rand_seeds.txt
• For the above I highly recommend Random.org's Random File Generation Service https://files.random.org/ (cheap) or manually build random_seeds.txt with strings generated by their free Random String Generator Service. https://www.random.org/strings/

Building the Platform

# Clone the repo into a suitable place under your GOPATH
mkdir -p ~/go/src/github.com/rohanthewiz/
cd ~/go/src/github.com/rohanthewiz/
git clone <the-project-clone-url>
cd church
go build

Initial Run

• I do apologize that there is some seeding required here
• Start the server ./church
• A token is written to the file token.txt in the project root. Use the token to create the superadmin user with a url similar to: server.domain/super?username=mysuperuser&password=secret&token=theTokenblahblah.
• The slug of the Main menu should be hardwired to "main-menu". For now manually update that DB entry
• The slug for the Footer menu also should be hardwired to "footer-menu"
• One page must be made the home page with a slug of "home"

Install RunIt process supervisor (Optional) for running the app

sudo apt-get install runit

• sudo mkdir -p /etc/sv/church
• cd /etc/sv/church
• sudo nano run
• Below is a sample Runit script
• Note: chpst (Change Process state) looks for envars in env_dir specified by the -e flag

#!/bin/sh -e
exec 2>&1
cd /home/myuser/go/src/github.com/rohanthewiz/church
exec chpst -e /etc/service/church/env_dir "/home/myuser/go/src/github.com/rohanthewiz/church/church"

• sudo chmod +x run
• ./run # it should run manually
• cd /etc/service
• sudo ln -s /etc/sv/church church
• sudo sv status church
• sudo sv up church

Backup the DB (Might be a good candidate for crontab)

• On the server run pg_dump -U myuser church_development > ~/church_db-2018-0624.sql

Contributing

• Contribute only non-styling changes. Styling should be done in your main project
• Individual projects can make styling changes in their master branch
• Individual projects can then merge changes from core into their master branch without affecting their individual styling.
• In summary: core is the shareable branch, master is your own
• We will not accept styling changes in a PR, so keep those out of core if you'd like to contribute back to the project
• A contribution flow might look like this:
  1. Fork the project
  2. Clone your repo
  3. git checkout master
  4. Git add and commit code changes
  5. Test, test, test
  6. Git push
  7. On Github, make a pull request to this project

Happy Coding :-)