🐊 Gator

A blog aggregator in Golang. Guided by Boot.dev.

Prerequisites

• A working installation of PostgreSQL v15 or later. Refer to the documentation.
• A working installation of Golang. See https://go.dev/doc/install.

How To Use

Clone the repository and head into the root directory of the project.

git clone https://github.com/uncomfyhalomacro/gator
cd gator

Setup PostgreSQL

Start the Postgres server in the background

• Mac: brew services start postgresql@15
• Linux: sudo service postgresql start

Connect to the server. I recommend simply using the psql client. It's the "default" client for Postgres, and it's a great way to interact with the database. While it's not as user-friendly as a GUI like PGAdmin, it's a great tool to be able to do at least basic operations with.

Enter the psql shell:

• Mac: psql postgres
• Linux: sudo -u postgres psql

You should see a new prompt that looks like this:

postgres=#

Create a new database.

CREATE DATABASE gator;

Connect to the new database:

\c gator

You should see a new prompt that looks like this:

gator=#

Set the user password (Linux only)

ALTER USER postgres PASSWORD 'postgres';

You can type exit to leave the psql shell.

Get your connection string. A connection string is just a URL with all of the information needed to connect to a database. The format is:

protocol://username:password@host:port/database

Setup the migrations

Install goose

go install github.com/pressly/goose/v3/cmd/goose@latest

While inside your local copy of the repository, head to sql/schema/ directory and run the command

goose postgres "postgres://postgres:@localhost:5432/gator" up

This should set up all the tables for the gator database.

Setup a config file

Create a config file called .gatorconfig.json at your $HOME directory.

The JSON file should have this structure (when prettified):

{
	"db_url": "postgres://postgres:@localhost:5432/gator?sslmode=disable"
}

The db_url is your connection string, appended with ?sslmode=disable.

Install and Run SQLC

You need sqlc to generate Go code. See https://docs.sqlc.dev/en/latest/overview/install.html.

Then run sqlc generate to generate Go code.

Build the gator command

go build
./gator register yourUsername  # You are automagically logged in
./gator addfeed "Hacker News RSS" "https://hnrss.org/newest"

Run the aggregator in the background

./gator agg

In another terminal, you can check and browse your followed feeds.

./gator browse
./gator browse 10

Checkout the other subcommands below.

Subcommands

• following checks the list of followed RSS feeds for the currently logged in user
• login logins a registered user
• reset resets the users database. WARNING -> destructive operation
• agg collects posts for the registered user
• addfeed adds a feed for the user. the args should be in the order 'title' 'url'. follows the feed for the user afterwards
• follow follows a feed URL for the currently logged in user if it exists in the database
• unfollow unfollows a feed URL for the currently logged in user if it exists in the database
• register registers a new user. fails if user exists
• users lists the registered users
• browse browse recent posts for the currently logged in user. recieves one additional parameter, a number to limit the number of posts shown
• feeds list of feed URLs added by the users