khskarl / hashtago-stalker

🐻🐦 HashtaGO Stalker!

Disclaimer: This is my first time writing Go, therefore some design decisions were limited due my unfamiliarity with the language, e.g. didn't get to use Go modules or packages.

HashtaGO is a small webapp that tracks Twitter's tweets in real time under user-specified hashtags. The app is composed of a RESTful backend API and a minimalistic what gets-the-job-done VanillaJS frontend.

Due the project's scope, constraints and my inexperience with golang, no work was put into using a database or security (/api/ routes shouldn't be visible to the frontend user).

Still the project is not unstructured, it tries to divide the system into three major components: Stalker API, Tweet Stream and Tweet Storage. Each component is written to be minimal and responsible for a single class of tasks, i.g. the stream is responsible for receiving tweets from the Twitter API, which are then sent through go channels to the Tweet Storage for storing tweets and allowing internal components to access them from the storage. Stalker API is exclusively responsible for managing the backend API to interact with the frontend system.

Installing

Clone the repository into your $GOPATH. While inside the repository run go build to build the hashtago-stalker executable.

To run the program, first do the environment setup and execute the executable generated:

./hashtago-stalker

Environment setup

The program needs two environment variables to be set, TWITTER_CONSUMER_KEY and TWITTER_CONSUMER_SECRET. This can be done in bash/zsh/any-bash-syntax:

export TWITTER_CONSUMER_KEY=your_consumer_key_here
export TWITTER_CONSUMER_SECRET=your_cool_consumer_secret_here

Or if you are one of the cooler kids, you can do it in fish like this:

set -x TWITTER_CONSUMER_KEY    your_beautiful_consumer_key_here
set -x TWITTER_CONSUMER_SECRET your_wonderful_consumer_secret_here

Optionally you can also set the server port through the env variable PORT, otherwise it will default to the port 3000.

Known issues

• 🐤

Future improvements

• Add tests. Due my lack of experience with Go and the diversity of tweet data to be mocked, writing tests isn't trivial