Urchin 🐚

Urchin is a headless CMS (Content Management System) written in Golang, designed to be fast, efficient, and easily extensible. It allows you to create a website or blog, with any template you like, in only a few commands.

Features 🚀

• Headless Architecture: Adding pages, posts, or forms should all be done with easy requests to the API.
• Golang-Powered: Leverage the performance and safety of one of the best languages in the market for backend development.
• SQL Database Integration: Store your posts and pages in SQL databases for reliable and scalable data storage.
• Post: We can add, update, and delete posts. Posts can be served through a unique URL.
• Pages: TODO.
• Menus: TODO
• Live Reload through the use of air.

Running Urchin

Urchin is developed with Golang, so make sure you have a recent enough version of the compiler and you also follow the instructions in the following sections.

Build Requirements

If you're runnig Urchin locally, you should install all the requirements needed to build the application. Here's a list of all the dependencies needed:

• Goose for database migrations: go install github.com/pressly/goose/v3/cmd/[email protected]
• Templ for code generation: go install github.com/a-h/templ/cmd/[email protected]
• (optionally) Air for live reloading: go install github.com/cosmtrek/[email protected]

Ensure that you have the binaries in the $GOBIN directory somewhere in your path, so you can call these tools from the terminal.

Alternatively, if your platform supports make, run the following command from the project repo:

make install-tools

Database Migrations

Once the requirements are installed, make sure you run the Goose migrations for the database. We recommend creating a database called urchin and running the following command:

cd migrations
GOOSE_DRIVER="mysql" GOOSE_DBSTRING="root:root@/urchin" goose up

Replace the database connection string with the appropriate string dependending on where your database is.

After you've replaced the default template files with your prefered template, simply build and start the app with the following commands.

Building and Running Urchin

If your platform has support for Makefiles, simply call make:

make build
./tmp/urchin --config urchin_config.toml

This will start Urchin on http://localhost:8080. You can change the configuration by editing the urchin_config.toml file.

For more information, see the configuration settings.

Running with Docker Compose

To run with docker-compose, use the following command:

docker-compose -f docker/docker-compose.yml up

This will start two containers: one containing the urchin app, serving on port 8080, and another one serving the mariadb database internally. This will also run the migrations automatically to setup the database!

Development

If you want to debug the application, you can use docker compose to startup just the mariadb container, then hook Urchin to your favourite debugger (e.g. Vscode).

To startup the mariadb database, run the following command from the project root:

docker compose -f docker/mariadb.yml up

Wait a little bit for the database container to start, then run the migration steps:

cd migrations
GOOSE_DRIVER="mysql" GOOSE_DBSTRING="root:root@/urchin" goose up

Once the database is up and migrated, you can run Urchin with your favourite debugger setup. For the Vscode and delve setup, we have provided the file .vscode/launch.json so you should just be able to select the (admin) app from the Vscode debugging dropdown.

Architecture

Currently, the architecture of urchin is still in its early days. The plan is to have two main applications: the public facing application to serve the content through a website, and the admin application that can be hidden, where users can modify the settings, add posts, pages, etc.

In the above image, you can see the two applications running alongside, and they share a database connection where the data is actually stored. The list below explains some of the data intended to be stored in the database:

• posts: a table where each row is an individual post, containing the title, content, and any other relevant data.
• pages: a table where HTML can be stored to be served as individual pages on a website.
• cards: Still TODO. Need to decide how this will allow users to display menu-like pages with cards.

Configuration

The runtime configuration can be done through a toml configuration file or by setting the mandatory environment variables (fallback). This approach was chosen because configuration via toml supports advanced features (i.e. relationships, arrays, etc.). The .dev.env-file is used to configure the development database through docker-compose.

toml configuration

The application can be started by providing the config flag which has to be set to a toml configuration file. The file has to contain the following mandatory values:

database_address = "localhost" # Address to the MariaDB database
database_user = "urchin" # User to access database
database_password = "urchinpw" # Password for the database user
database_port = 3306 # The port to use for the application
database_name = "urchin" # The database to use for Urchin
webserver_port = 8080 # The application port Urchin should use
admin_port = 8081 # The port in which the admin app will be running
image_dir = "./images" # Directory to use for storing uploaded images.

# Navbar section specifies the links that appear on
# the navbar
[navbar]
links = [
    { name = "Home", href = "/", title = "Homepage" },
    { name = "About", href = "/about", title = "About page" },
    { name = "Services", href = "/services", title = "Services page" },
    { name = "Images", href = "/images", title = "Images page" },
    { name = "Contact", href = "/contact", title = "Contacts page" },
]

Important: The configuration values above are used to start-up the local development database.

Dependencies

For the development of Urchin, you require additional dependecies, that can easily be installed with go.

• Templ (for generating Go files from temple-files)
• Goose (for migrating the database that Urchin relies on)

Optional:

• Air (for hot-reloading Go projects)

To install the development dependencies simply execute the following Go commands:

go install github.com/pressly/goose/v3/cmd/[email protected] 
go install github.com/a-h/templ/cmd/[email protected] 
go install github.com/cosmtrek/[email protected] 

After installing the required dependecies and starting the pre-configured database, you can simply execute the following command to execute the migration of the database for development purposes.

source .dev.env # sets the environment variable for the goose command.
cd migrations/
GOOSE_DRIVER="mysql" GOOSE_DBSTRING="$MARIADB_USER:$MARIADB_PASSWORD@tcp($MARIADB_ADDRESS:$MARIADB_PORT)/$MARIADB_DATABASE" goose up