Forumeong

A Forum built using Spring-Boot and Firebase.

How it works

There are three endpoints: /users, /threads and /threads/posts

All of these endpoints have their own crud operations and the data is stored in the Firestore database.

All authentication is handled using Firebase client-side, you'll notice there is no authentication code here. On creating a user, the client-side code posts it into the database for future use.

Read on to see how to get the project working, or to just know how it works.

The Firestore structure

There are two main documents that are expected in your firestore: threads and users.

threads should have subdocuments called posts

Overall, this is what they should look like:

post: {
    "id": String,
    "authorName": String,
    "pfpUrl": String,
    "created": Server Timestamp,  // (In ISO 8601) 
    "content": String
}

thread: {
    "id": String,
    "title": String,
    "content": String,
    "authorId": String,
    "authorName": String,
    "pfpUrl": String,
    "created": Server Timestamp,  // (In ISO 8601) 
    "updated": Server Timestamp,  // (In ISO 8601) 
    "category": String,
    "postCount": int,
    "lastPost": Server Timestamp,  // (In ISO 8601) 
}

user: {
    "id": String,
    "username": String,
    "email": String,
    "pfpUrl": String,
    "created": Server Timestamp,  // (In ISO 8601) 
    "bio": String,
    "postsCount": int,
    "threadsCount": int
}

Connecting the Frontend

You can find the frontend repo for the project here

Transfer the contents of the frontend build directory to src/main/resources/static

This makes testing a pain, so I recommend setting up your own testing environment, but I personally just chose to build it everytime I made some progress. (I really recommend finding a better way to do it)

Starting the server

Ensure you have Java 21 and Maven installed on your system. Maven shold take care of all the other dependencies for you.

Next, you need to have the key to your service account. This is a json file that should be present in your root directory.

The Firebase docs describe how to get the key

To generate a private key file for your service account:

  1. In the Firebase console, open Settings > Service Accounts.

  2. Click Generate New Private Key, then confirm by clicking Generate Key.

  3. Securely store the JSON file containing the key.

Finally, Start the dev server by using:

mvn spring-boot:run

Closing note

I once read a medium article where the author stated that they did not have a closing note to add, so instead there was just a video of a samoyed eating a watermelon. I do not have a closing note either so here's a link to the same video:

ASMR Dog Eating Watermelon