go-blog

What is this?

go-blog is a standalone executable that hosts a customizable blog! Configure some settings, and run the binary, and you will have a blog which people can visit!

Requirements

1. You will need at least go 1.20. This is the version I was able to test it.
2. Access to a MySQL database (connection string)

Build and Run

To build the program, you can just run the included shell script, build.sh.

./build.sh

After that, the server executable will be emitted. This is the binary to run the service.

Ensure that the configuration.json has the correct settings, and just run the server like this:

./server

The blog is live! 🎉🥳

Structure

The blog is designed to highly customizable. If you want to change the static content to fit your tastes, here are some good places to start:

• All static files are within the public directory. The common use case is to place static assets such as JavaScript, and CSS here.
• All template files are in the views directory. Modify these to customize your pages.

Schema

You'd minimally need a post table with the following MySQL schema:

CREATE TABLE post (
    id PRIMARY KEY AUTO_INCREMENT, 
    slug TEXT,
    title TEXT,
    content TEXT,
    created DATETIME,
    published BOOLEAN
);

configuration.json

It's relatively straightforward to configure the configuration.json file. The 2 main things to make the app work are:

• database_url_env - The environment variable to reference so that the connection string to the database. So for example, common setting value would be DATABASE_URL, which would reference the env variable called DATABASE_URL within the system to find the DB connection string.
• http_port = The port to listen to.

Building the Connection String

The connection string is in the format:

username:password@tcp(hostname:port)/database_name

So you'd have an environment variable like this:

export DATABASE_URL="username:password@tcp(hostname:port)/database_name"

And in configuration.json, you can set it like this:

{
  "database_url_env": "DATABASE_URL"
}

Other

This project will be updated from time to time. I use it for real things. You can contact me at urbanspr1nter@gmail.com too!