Guild

A forum running in production.

Setup and Install

The Guild is a Node.js app that talks to a Postgres database.

• Install the latest stable version of Node.

• The Guild depends on the plv8 Postgres extension. This extension can sometimes fail to build, so the binary can be found here: plv8/plv8#220

Archive Link: https://web.archive.org/web/20200604033753/https://github.com/plv8/plv8/issues/220

• Download the repository and enter the directory that it created:

    git clone [email protected]:danneu/guild.git
    cd guild
  

• Enter the guild directory and install its dependencies:

    npm install
  

• Launch Postgres (by default it will run on http://localhost:5432) and create an empty database named guild.

    createdb guild
  

• The Guild comes with a command that rebuilds the database with tables and fills them with some data to play with:

    npm run reset-db
  

• Now you can launch the server:

    npm start
    > Listening on http://localhost:3000
  

Building js/css assets

The guild uses gulp to build assets into the folder ./dist/ which will include a manifest file ./dist/rev-manifest.json that contains the name of the bundles.

dist/
    fonts/
    all-155a92ba49.js
    all-bfacf3040f.css
    rev-manifest.json

You can run the task with:

npm run assets

If the dist folder exists, then the compiled js/css/fonts bundles will be served.

Otherwise, i.e. for development, all of the js/css/font files are loaded individually and uncompiled.

In other words, you must run npm run assets in production for the compiled assets to be served, and you must also remember to rebuild them when they change, else stale bundles will be served.

Config and Environment Variables

The Guild is configured with environment variable listed in server/config.js.

It will run with the default variables, but some features are turned off until they are configured:

• Email-sending system requires AWS_KEY and AWS_SECRET (your http://aws.amazon.com/ API creds)
• User registration system requires RECAPTCHA_SITEKEY and RECAPTCHA_SITESECRET (your https://www.google.com/recaptcha/intro/index.html API creds)