An alternative to Pastebin or GitHub Gists, built in Go

Overview

Snippetbox is a simple web application that lets you store and share snippets of text or code. It's designed as a practical project to learn and demonstrate idiomatic Go web development, including best practices for project structure, secure session management, database interaction, and HTML templating.

Features

• Create, view, and share code/text snippets.
• List latest public snippets.
• Expiry time for each snippet.
• Simple, clean web interface.
• Secure session management using cookies.
• MySQL database backend.
• Templated HTML views.
• Static asset embedding using Go's embed package.

Project Structure

snippetbox/
├── cmd/
│   └── web/            # Main web server application
├── internal/
│   └── models/         # Database models (Snippet, User, etc.)
├── ui/
│   ├── html/           # HTML templates
│   ├── static/         # Static assets (CSS, JS, images)
│   └── efs.go          # Asset embedding
├── go.mod
├── go.sum
└── .gitignore

• cmd/web/: Entry point with main.go configuring the server, routes, and dependencies.
• internal/models/: Contains data access logic for snippets and users.
• ui/html/: HTML templates for rendering pages.
• ui/static/: CSS, JavaScript, and images for the frontend.
• ui/efs.go: Uses Go's embed to package templates and static files into the binary.

Getting Started

Prerequisites

• Go 1.18 or newer
• MySQL database

Clone and Setup

git clone https://github.com/hawkaii/snippetbox.git
cd snippetbox

Install Dependencies

go mod tidy

Database Setup

1. Create a MySQL database and user.
2. Use the following schema to create the snippets table:

CREATE TABLE snippets (
  id INT AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY,
  title VARCHAR(100) NOT NULL,
  content TEXT NOT NULL,
  created DATETIME NOT NULL,
  expires DATETIME NOT NULL
);

3. Update the dsn (data source name) in cmd/web/main.go or run with the correct DB credentials:

   -dsn "user:password@/snippetbox?parseTime=true"
   

Running the App

go run ./cmd/web

By default, the app runs on https://localhost:4000

Note: TLS certificates (cert.pem and key.pem) are required for HTTPS. You can generate self-signed certs for local development.

Access

Open your browser at https://localhost:4000

Credits

• Built by hawkaii
• Based on Let's Go by Alex Edwards