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Posting

Posting is a lightweight microblogging framework. I created it because I wanted an easy way to share personal photos without relying on social media. It is written in Go, uses Firestore as a database, and Imgur for image hosting. You can see an example of it in action here.

Features

• Lightweight
• Supports text and images
• Very cheap (almost free) to operate at small scale
• Easy to publish new posts
• Easy to deploy (and well suited for Google App Engine)

Running Locally

Requirements

• Go
• Docker
• An Imgur account with corresponding client ID

Start local server

1. Edit dev_vars.env so that IMGUR_CLIENT_ID contains your Imgur client ID.
2. Start the local Firestore DB emulator via make docker-firestore-run
3. Start the server on port 8008 via make run-local
4. Navigate to http://localhost:8008/posts. You should see a mostly-empty homepage template.

Add a new post

1. Head to http://localhost:8008/new where you will be greeted with a basic auth login prompt
   • The default username is dev and the password is posting.
   • You can modify these values in dev_vars.env; note that the password is base64 encoded.
2. Now you will find a minimal (ugly) HTML form for adding a new Post
   • Add a text blurb and optionally select an image to upload.
   • Note that a Post must contain a text blurb OR at least one image.
3. Hit the POST button. You will be redirected to the home page, where your post is visible.

Deploy

Deploying a Posting instance is fairly simple. How and where you deploy is up to you, but these are the necessary steps.

1. Create a Firestore Database.
2. Configure your deployment environment with the appropriate environment variables.
3. Clone this repo to your deployment environment then go build and execute the resulting artifact.

I personally host Posting on Google App Engine because it is easy and cheap. Here is an example app.yaml:

runtime: go119
instance_class: F1

env_variables:
  IMGUR_CLIENT_ID: "your client ID"
  GCLOUD_PROJECT_ID: "your project ID"
  BASIC_AUTH_USERNAME: "changeme"
  BASIC_AUTH_PASSWORD: "some base64 encoded password"

handlers:
- url: /.*
  script: auto
  secure: always