Forum

An open source full-stack forum system developed in PERNG stack, where students can discuss, ask questions and write blogs.

Main features

1. Barebone forum system for colleges to use
2. Extensible, you can extend the features as you like
3. FullText debounced search
4. Secure JWT authentication
5. Load tested GRAPHQL API (check load test results inside /load_tests directory)
6. Uses batching and caching to solve famous N+1 problem and make efficient requests
7. Full Markdown support for posts and even comments
8. Light theme/Dark theme
9. Like Posts
10. Draft/Publish posts

Quick Start

Fork (optional) and clone this repository. Make changes according to your college in client/src/app.json following the app-example.json. For example,

{
	"college": "OUTR",
	"collegeUrl": "https://cet.edu.in",
	"branches": [
		"CSE",
		"IT",
		"EE",
		"EIE",
		"MECH",
		"CIVIL",
		"BIO",
		"FAT",
		"TE",
		"B.PLAN"
	]
}

and that's it, it's ready for deployment.

Development

Fork and clone the repository.

For local development (using docker),

Make sure you have docker running on the background.

Note: Check URL inside client/src/index.tsx and change it to /graphql if you're using docker as everything is handled by nginx proxy.

Then run,

docker-compose up

Now you can visit http://localhost:3050/ to see the application running. To better understand this, we can visualise the process with the diagram below

For local development (not using docker),

In one terminal (for running client),

Note: Check URL inside client/src/index.tsx and change it to http://localhost:4000/graphql if you're not using docker.

1. cd client
2. npm i
3. npm start

You will have the client running at http://localhost:3000

In another terminal (for running server), Make sure you have psql running in the background. Make a .env file and add these values:

DATABASE_URL="postgres://postgres:postgres@localhost:5432/mydb?sslmode=disable?connect_timeout=300"
JWT_SECRET=mysecret

Provide the uri of your postgres instance, for example:

DATABASE_URL=postgres://YourUserName:YourPassword@YourHostname:5432/YourDatabaseName

Inside dev.sh file also change the DATABASE_URL accordingly. Then run, sh dev.sh

Note: This is required to do one time to run the db migrations, afterwards you can use npm run dev

You will have the server running at http://localhost:4000

Features to add in future

• Notifications system

Contributing

Pull requests are much appreciated. Please let us know about the features you would like to see in the future in the issues section.