(API) Forum Application

This is the front-end of a Forum application built with rust, actix-web, tokio, postgresql.

In this application, you can

• Write, save and comment on a post.
• Reply a comment, which in turn be replied to.
• Filter post by hashtags and sort by latest or highest engaged post.
• View users and see their created post.
• View posts saved by a user.

Here is a preview:

Setup

Here, I assume you may already have rust, cargo and postgres installed and accessible from your command line.

To set up the application locally, you first clone this repository and modify your environment variables. There is a file called .env.example which you can rename to .env and use as your environment variables. Below are the bash codes for the above

# clone the repo
git clone https://github.com/CudiLala/forum-api.git

# copy the example env as your .env file
cp .env.example .env

The .env.exmaple file looks like this

THREADS = 8
JWT_SECRET = 'yourjwtsecret'

PG.USER = 'forum'
PG.PASSWORD = 'postgresuserpassword'
PG.HOST = '127.0.0.1'
PG.PORT = '5432'
PG.DBNAME = 'forum'
PG.POOL.MAX_SIZE = '16'

CORS_ORIGIN = 'http://localhost:5173'
SERVER_PORT = 8080

In your .env file, you can edit PG.PASSWORD field. But it's better to leave the PG.USER and PG.DBNAME as given. If you edited PG.PASSWORD make sure to edit the user.sql file before proceeding with the postgres setup. The schema.sql file uses the user forum, so you can edit all that too, if you wish to change the user.

Set up postgres

First, cd into the forum-api directory.

To set up postgresql, first we create the postgres user and forum database. If you edited PG.PASSWORD update user.sql file with your new password

  psql -f user.sql -U postgres -W 

This may produce an error, if you do not have password authentication set up of user 'postgres'. If it fails, you can copy the content of user.sql and paste in your postgres shell, in pgadmin or any of your postgres IDE. Or you can switch to your postgres user and run the above code without -W flag.

Next, you will have to create postgres shema. To do that, run

  psql -f schema.sql -U forum -W 

You will have to enter the passowrd you created for user forum. This may produce an error, if you do not have password authentication set up for any user. If it fails, you can copy the content of schema.sql and paste in your postgres shell, in pgadmin or any of your postgres IDE.

You can then build your rust binaries with

  # development
  cargo build

  #production
  cargo build --release

You can then run your application

  cargo run

If you encountered any error setting up the application you can contact me @ augustinemadu9@gmail.com