This project was my final project for CS529 Cloud Application Development for my MS Computer Science program at Willamette University. The goal of the project was to create a Reddit- or Hacker News-style forum to explore hosting an application in the cloud.
The front-end of the application is written entirely in vanilla CSS and JavaScript, with no dependencies (other than Google Fonts, if you count that). The back-end of the application is a Node/ExpressJS application with a static front-end and a REST API backend.
I use the following 3rd-party APIs in this application:
- Google API for Sign in with Google/OAuth2
- Mailgun API for sending notification e-mails
The application is proxied behind Cloudflare, which is also used to manage DNS.
This application is structured as a monolith with two main subcomponents: the web container and the recurring actions (or recur container). I took this approach to minimize the overhead that would otherwise be associated with running a serverless application while still avoiding the ma
For this application to work, you will need to do the following configuration:
You should set these with Heroku Config.
DOMAIN=$YOUR_DOMAIN_NAME
ERROR_PAGE_URL='https://ari-s.com/stassinopoulosari/misc-html/evil-forum-error.html'
GOOGLE_OAUTH2_CLIENT_ID=$YOUR_GOOGLE_CLIENT_ID
GOOGLE_OAUTH2_CLIENT_SECRET=$YOUR_GOOGLE_CLIENT_SECRET
MAILGUN_API_KEY=$YOUR_MAILGUN_API_KEY
MAINTENANCE_PAGE_URL='https://ari-s.com/stassinopoulosari/misc-html/evil-forum-error.html'
PROTOCOL=https
SESSION_SECRET=$YOUR_SESSION_SECRETYou will also need to create a Postgres Database with Heroku by running scripts/reset.sh.
To run the application locally, you will need to run npm run local. In order to deploy to Heroku, ou may run scripts/launch.sh.
While I have closed the live demo for the Evil Forum, I have included some screenshots of the user interface below:
| Home Screen | Profile Page | Comments (self-post> |
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| New Post | Comments (link post> | |
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Write me! hello@ari-s.com