Hackernews Clone

(Production) Architecture

Setup

See docs/SETUP.md for production and development setups.

Versioning Goals

Alpha (MVP, v0.1.0)

Features

• Magic Link login system (password free, managed by JWT tokens)
• Submission Posting (with full Google Captcha v3 support)
• Submission Voting (upvotes/downvotes, options to sort by votes)
• User bio/birthday/full name customization on "account settings" page
• Command line logging (HTTP request logging + logging from business logic files)
• .env config files used on frontend & backend

In Progress

• Basic admin page (basic website metrics)
• Name change!

Beta ("version two", v0.2.0)

In Progress

• Comments (and comment threads)
• Ability to report a post (and maybe a user?)
• Fully working admin page (view/delete flagged posts, delete users, view full website metrics)
• Clean up error handling (mostly using Log.fatal now, not great for production as this kills the program)

Production ("version three", v1.0.0)

• Logging to a file, which is then synced with a S3 Bucket

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Feature Implementation Checklist

Feature	API Status	Web Status	Notes
Login via Magic Link	✅ Complete	✅ Complete	JWT-based authentication, cannot be done over eduroam because they block outbound email port connections.
Magic Link accept page	✅ Complete	✅ Complete	Page where the server validates the magic link found in the email, and adds the token to browser cookies
News/Submission Feed	🟡 In Progress	🟡 In Progress	Need to complete different kinds of sorts (newest, best, oldest), and requires pagination
Post Submission	✅ Complete	✅ Complete
User Profile Page	✅ Complete	✅ Complete
Comments	⬜ Not Started	⬜ Not Started	SQL implementation is complete
Admin Console	🟡 In Progress	⬜ Not Started	SQL implementation completed; added isAdmin to user API

To Do

• Modularize routes
• Improved error handling (ie. stop using log.Fatal and start using fmt.Errorf)
• New name

Route Modularization File Structure

|--main.go
|--routes/
|    |--user.go
|    |--login.go
|--handlers/
|    |--user_handler.go
|    |--login_handler.go

Logging

HTTP request logging is done by a built in middleware for Fiber. Other logs are placed in the database and backend "core" logic files.

Type	Description
[INFO]	Basic event, not very important
[WARN]	Some sort of failure took place, wasn't fatal
[FATAL]	Error that killed the program took place, pay attention to these

Future: toggle logging via .env (PRODUCTION=true), see this ChatGPT conversion for more on that.