tmemes: putting the meme in TS

This bit of fun was brought to you through the amazing power of Tailscale, and the collaborative efforts of

• Maisem Ali: "I think we need memegen"
• M. J. Fromberger: "why did I not think of that"
• Jenny Zhang: "ok i’m finally in front of a computer, can I go write some css"
• Salman Aljammaz: (quietly moves heaven and earth inside a <canvas>)
• Shayne Sweeney: "Would I be stepping on toes if I built a Slack bot?"

together with a lovely and inspirational crew of supporters. There's lots more fun still to be had, so if you want to jump in, read on! There is also a wishlist of TODO items at the bottom.

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Synopsis

tmemes is a web app built mainly in Go and running on tsnet. This is a very terse description of how it all works.

• The server is tmemes, a standalone Go binary using tsnet. Run

  TS_AUTHKEY=$KEY go run ./tmemes
  

  to start the server. Make sure your tailnet ACL allows access to this node, and you should be able to visit http://tmemes in the browser.

• The server "database" is a directory of files. Use --data-dir to set the location; it defaults to /tmp/tmemes.

• Terminology:

  • Template: A base image that can be decorated with text.
  • Macro: An image macro combining a template and a text overlay.
  • Text overlay: Lines of text with position and typographical info.

  Types are in types.go.

• The data directory contains an index.db which is a SQLite database (schema in store/schema.sql), plus various other directories of image content:

  • templates are the template images.
  • macros are cached macros (re-generated on the fly as needed).
  • static are some static assets used by the macro generator (esp. fonts).

  The store package kinda provides a thin wrapper around these data.

• UI elements are generated by Go HTML templates in tmemes/ui. These are statically embedded into the server and served by the handlers.

• Static assets needed by the UI are stored in tmemes/static. These are served via /static/ paths in the server mux.

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Links

• API documentation
• Task wishlist (#4)