escapehatch

Try it

The project is alive and well at escapehatch.ca!

Overview

Escapehatch is a platform where users track and share their favorite books and shows. The site is built and operated by me (hi!) and launched for early users in June 2023. We are in active development towards our v1 milestone.

Join the r/escapehatch Reddit community where I post regular progress updates.
Submit bugs and features to the dedicated issue tracker

Tech specs

Escapehatch is a monorepo project where the backend is built using Go and MongoDB and the frontend is built using React. The backend is hosted on Google App Engine and deployed on each commit using Google Cloud Build. The frontend is hosted on Vercel and deployed on each commit. MongoDB Atlas hosts our database. Static assets are stored in a Google Cloud Storage bucket. SendGrid is used for email integration.

The Ideal User

You love reading, watching shows, and diving into the worlds that others have created. You feel a sense of achievement when you finish a new book or show. You think that the content you consume says something about who you are and you want to showcase this to others. You can even think of recent conversations where having a list of your favorites on hand would have come in handy.

You're methodical, you like seeing your achievements and progress laid out in front of you, especially if you can organize them. You like making lists and the time you spend organizing your hobbies feels like a hobby itself. You aren't daunted that most of your content needs to be added manually by you to the site, in fact you feel excited. You're a completionist and the goal of being the one to contribute entries that others will see and find useful is a thrill. You could sit for hours just filling in missing content on the site if it means your contributions will gain you recognition across the platform.

Roadmap

Current phase: Building v1

V1

The bare minimum feature set for the ideal user to find value:

Passwordless login
Account setup wizard
Profile page displays user's shelves (Movies, TV Shows, Books)
Search page to find items to add to shelves
Followers page to view followers, following, and search for users
Item details page with additional action buttons (remove from shelf)
Form to add new items to the DB
Form to edit or remove item from DB

V2

Features to increase delight and stickiness for the ideal user:

Create/edit/delete custom shelves
Set additional item attributes (read/unread, progress tracking, dates)
View shelf as full page
Rearrange items on shelves (drag)
New follower notification
Publish leaderboard of user contributions ...

Development

Setup

Unless you're me, I don't really recommend trying to run this locally. Usually this repo is private, but I've opened it up temporarily to showcase the code. But if you're super determined to run it yourself here are the steps that should get you most of the way.

Make sure you have Go, MongoDB and npm installed.
Create /backend/.env file

My /backend/.env file looks like this:

#!/bin/bash

export MONGO_DB_NAME="escapehatch"
export MONGO_HOST="mongodb://localhost:27017"
export ORIGIN="http://localhost:3000"
export USE_SENDGRID="true" # I still use the live emails when running locally, but try setting this to false to avoid needing the Sendgrid integration
export SENDGRID_API_KEY="<Your own Sendgrid API Key>"
export SENDGRID_FROM_EMAIL="<Your own Sendgrid From email>"
export FRONTEND_HOST="http://localhost:3000"
export PRODUCTION="false"
export USE_GCS="false"
export GCS_BUCKET_NAME=""
export STATIC_URL_ROOT="http://localhost:8080/local-static"
export USE_ATLAS_SEARCH="false"
export TEST_EMAIL="<Your personal email>" # Test accounts will be generated that you can log into
export TEST_MONGO_DB_NAME="escapehatch-test"

Create /frontend/.env.local file

My frontend/.env.local looks like this:

REACT_APP_API_HOST="http://localhost:8080"

Run locally

In /backend, run go run main.go to start the API server.

In /frontend, run npm start to start the frontend on localhost:3000.

Note, there are some issues running the frontend on higher versions of node. If you have problems try nvm use 15.14.0, may need to use an elevated console.

See /backend/.env and /frontend/.env.local to set environment variables.

Testing

In /backend run go test ./...

This will run unit tests. It will also run an end-to-end test suite using a temporary database. The database is preserved after tests are run allowing it to serve as a source of seed data for manual testing. See .env file to configure.

Please add appropriate unit and end-to-end tests for all new features.

JakeStrang1 / escapehatch