dtdb

A potential future replacement for imdt: the archive of past shows put on by DramaTech Theatre in Atlanta, GA

Development

Reference Material

The backend for this site is written primarily in rust. It uses:

• Diesel as a database abstraction layer
  • Models are in src/data/models/.
  • The autogenerated schema is in src/data/schema.rs.
  • Migrations are in migrations/.
• Tera as a templating engine
  • The templates are in views/.
  • view::Views is a thin wrapper around tera.
• Axum as the application server
  • Routes are configured in routes::build_routes, though I'm open to changing our abstractions around routing.
  • Handlers live in src/handlers/.
  • The shared state that all the handlers have access to is application::Application. It should be immutable after server initialization.

Environment Setup

The most direct way to get set up is to ensure you have docker installed and run

docker compose up

This will start containers for the database and the application server, initialialize and migrate the database, and start the application server on port 6474¹. It will also watch the current directory, and will rebuild and restart the application server on almost any change² to the application.

I want to set this up without using containers

First, get postgres running and accessible from your development environment in whatever manner works best for you. Note the connection details, then

echo "DATABASE_URL=postgres://user:pass@localhost:5432/dtdb_dev" >.env

where the credentials, host, and port are appropriate for your setup. The database name dtdb_dev is recommended, but you can name the database whatever you want. If it doesn't exist yet, it'll be created later as long as the user has permission to create a database.

Next, make sure you have rust installed, then run the following to migrate the DB:

# Install the CLI for the database abstraction library
cargo install diesel_cli --no-default-features --features postgres

# Create the database if it doesn't exist and run all the migrations
diesel setup

Finally, make sure everything's working:

cargo build
cargo test

Now, to launch the application server, you can run

cargo run -- --config config.json

Footnotes

1. chosen because it doesn't belong to any other popular application and "\x64\x74" is "dt" ↩

2. It may miss changes that only impact views, static files, or migrations. If you notice that happening, docker compose restart website should force a reload. ↩