woppleblox

No, not the fictional company - a micro-blogging app with a focus on being lightweight, easy to setup / install, and open.

From the developer that brings you Pepperminty Wiki and reviews tldr-pages PRs, I now bring you Woppleblox (well I will be, when it works :P).

Warning: Woppleblox is is pre-alpha quality. In other words, it's not finished yet. I've open-sourced it early, as someone asked to see the code. Suggestions are welcome, but don't expect it to actually work or for binaries to be available yet.

Follow along by clicking watch → watch releases in the top centre-right!

I'll occasionally be tweeting about it on my Twitter account @SBRLabs if you want to follow me there too.

Principles

Lightweight: Heavyweight dependencies should be avoided if possible, and the overall size kept to a minimum. If some features are optional, their dependencies should be as well. Hardware requirements should be minimal (hence no big database).
Open and Transparent: It should be easy to see how and where woppleblox is storing its data. It should also be easy to export data from woppleblox in a variety of standard formats that are accepted elsewhere. Importing would be nice too, but this is probably a nice-to-have that's some way off (and challenging to test).
Easy to install: It should be very easy to install and setup for the first time, such that even novices can get started using it

News

Current estimate: first usable build in ~6 months (as of April 2020)

2020-04-11: Most recently we've got the SQLite database connection & repos setup and the translation engine up and running (we think; untested as of yet), so next up we need to tackle the views, controllers, HTTP routing, and work towards a basic login system.

Getting started

You want to try running it! Wow, you're brave! Remember that it's not finished and it's not yet completed.

System requirements

rustc, cargo - the rust compiler & build tool
Linux (Windows & macOS might work, but I don't have either of these and I'm far too focused on making it actually work in the first place to support them. PRs welcome :P)

Compiling

Clone this repository, and then run the build script:

git clone https://github.com/sbrl/woppleblox.git
cd woppleblox;
./build run
# Or, for release mode (faster execution & *much* smaller binary, but no debugging output if it crashes and even slower compilation times):
SBRL_CARGO_FLAGS="--release" ./build run

This will take a while, 'cause the Rust compiler is slow. It will automatically start the server after compilation is completed. Binaries are written somewhere in the target, depending on whether you're compiling in debug or release mode.

Other versions

Before we got comfortable (I am? News to me :P) with Rust, we started implementing woppleblox in Node.js - but didn't get very far. That version exists here for reference (it was responsible for some nice patterns and code snippets), but you'll need to ask for permission to access it.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Because of the early stage that this project is at, please open an issue first before doing any serious work, 'cause things are changing quite quickly at the moment.

All contributions must be stated to be under the Mozilla Public Licence 2.0.

Licence

This project is licenced under the Mozilla Public Licence 2.0, the full text for which can be found in the LICENSE file in the root of this repository.

See also tldr legal, which has a nice short summary of what you can and can't do.