Threads

Show off your favorite public threads and offer hand-picked, fine-grained, topical subscriptions!

These are streams of thought you decide to float to your personal site for being a bit more-effort than other small posts, but still yet to be refined as a blog.

How it works:

1. a featured status will be fetched on the server along with qualified "descendants", which are replies of the same author in a single thread.
2. clean HTML with some styling will be sent to the viewer's browser
3. bit of client-side JS for progressive enhancement:
   1. <relative-time> by GitHub: https://github.com/github/relative-time-element
4. self-hostable with the app configuration in config.json file -- we are working on a docker way and easy configuration

See it in action.

The project is currently experimental. Some improvements need to be made with regards to app configuration, storing data, and easy deployment & usage.

Project setup

1. Set up your Debian (for other environments, search for counterpart instructions)

   # update repositories
   $ sudo apt update
   
   # install python stuff
   $ sudo apt install python3-pip python3-dev build-essential libssl-dev libffi-dev python3-setuptools python3-venv

For MacOS: https://docs.python.org/3/using/mac.html

2. Install dependencies and set up the project

   # clone the project 
   $ git clone git@git.sr.ht:~ayoayco/threads
   
   # go into the project directory
   $ cd threads
   
   # create app config from example
   $ cp example_config.json config.json
   
   # create python environment:
   $ python3 -m venv .venv
   
   # activate python env:
   $ . .venv/bin/activate
   
   # install dependencies
   (.venv)$ python -m pip install -r requirements.txt
   
   # create configuration from example config file
   (.venv)$ cp ./example_config.json ./config.json
   
   # rejoice!

3. To start development, run the following:

   (.venv)$ flask --debug run

   Note: On a Mac, the default port 5000 is used by AirDrop & Handoff; you may have to turn those off

4. After development session, deactivate the python env

   (.venv)$ deactivate

Deployment

For deployment, the recommended setup is with production server gunicorn and reverse proxy nginx. See the DigitalOcean tutorial (their website uses cookies).