Comify

Hi there, and welcome to Comify. 👋

Comify is an open source social media platform that leverages comics for communication. The idea is simple: take or upload a picture, add speech bubbles and share with others. These others can be related or unrelated users, depending on the view you're looking at. Comics can be liked, and users can react with a comment or another comic.

Project goals

Its intent is not to disrupt the social-media space, but to learn and improve building future-proofed applications that can grow. Besides that, it's also a demo project for our distributed runtime Jitar.

Current state

We're working hard to get the MVP done. To document the project we started writing articles about every step we take. You can read them and follow us on our LinkedIn page.

How to run

The project requires Node.js version 20+ to run the application and Docker for the additional services.

You need to set up the configuration first by copying the example.env file to a development.env file. Copying the file is enough for the first run. Then you can run the following command to start Docker:

npm run docker-compose up

This will start a Keycloack instance for account management, a MongoDB instance for data storage and a MinIO instance for storing the comic images.

Next you can start the application with the following commands:

npm install
npm run build
npm run standalone

This will start the Jitar runtime at port 3000. To start the application you need to run the following command in a new terminal:

npm run dev

Now a Vite dev server is running on port 5173. You can then navigate to http://localhost:5173 to see the application.

How to use

Click on the Get in button to be redirected to the Keycloak login page. Here you can create your own account and log in directly. If you want to use any of the social options, you need to configure them in development.env file. Don't forget to restart Docker afterwards.

Once you're in it should be pretty straightforward. You should be able to comic! If not, please let us know by starting a discussion or creating an issue.

Contributing

This project is not open for code contributions. However, if you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to contact us at comify@masking.tech, or post a message in the discussion section of this repository.