README.md

Blog.js

Blog.js is a simple blogging platform allowing users to share ideas.

Features

• Account creation and login via Keycloak
• Create public posts that everyone can read
• Create private posts that only you can read
• Edit your posts
• Markdown support - add images, code blocks, etc.
• View all posts by a specific user by clicking on their username

Technologies

• Frontend: React
  • react-router-dom
  • react-keycloak
  • react-markdown
  • remark-gfm
  • react-syntax-highlighter
• Backend: Express
  • knex
  • express-session
  • keycloak-connect
  • pg
• Authentication: Keycloak
• Database: PostgreSQL

Self-Hosting

If you would like to setup your own instance of Blog.js, start by ensuring you have Keycloak up and running. You will need to create two clients, one for the frontend and one for the backend. For example, you can call then blogjs-app and blogjs-api. Add the correct Root URL for both the frontend and backend. You should be able to keep the defaults for the frontend client, but for the backend client, under Settings, change the value for Access Type to bearer-only.

Once you have Keycloak set up, you can clone this repository and then copy the docker-compose.yml.sample file to docker-compose.yml. Then edit the environment variables to match your setup. Inside of the api folder, you will have to create a folder called env, and inside this folder, make a file called .env, and another file called db_pass.txt. Inside the .env file, add the following environment variables:

REALM_PUBLIC_KEY=<PUBLIC KEY FROM KEYCLOAK REALM ADMIN PAGE>
KEYCLOAK_SECRET=<ANY RANDOMLY GENERATED SECRET>

Inside the db_pass.txt add a secure, randomly generated password for the database.

Once the environment variables are all setup, run docker compose up -d to start the containers. If you make changes to the source code, you can rebuild the images with the rebuild.sh script.