HackerNews Clone
In this guide, we'll build a Hacker News clone using Go server-side templates and Tailwind for styling.
Open up your terminal and create a new project:
copper create -frontend=go:tailwind github.com/<your-username>/hackernews
Now, start the app server:
cd hackernews && copper run -watch
And in a separate terminal window, start the Tailwind server:
cd hackernews/web && npm run dev
Let's edit the
web/src/layouts/main.html file and make it look more like Hacker News:<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8" />
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0" />
<title>Hacker News Clone</title>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/static/styles.css" />
</head>
<body>
<div class="p-2 max-w-5xl mx-auto">
<div class="bg-orange-500 flex space-x-1">
<a href="/" class="block border-2 border-white text-xs text-white p-0.5 m-0.5">
HN
</a>
<div class="flex space-x-3 items-center">
<div class="font-bold">
{{ template "title" . }}
</div>
<div class="text-sm">
{{ template "links" . }}
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="bg-orange-100 p-2">
{{ template "content" . }}
</div>
</div>
</body>
</html>
This layout requires each page to define the
title, links, and content template. So, let's edit web/src/pages/index.html and define those template blocks:{{ define "title" }}
Hacker News
{{ end }}
{{ define "links" }}
<a href="/submit">submit</a>
{{ end }}
{{ define "content" }}
{{ end }}
Hacker News requires users to make submissions. Let's create a new Submit page with a simple form that can accept these submissions.
Run this command to create a new
/submit route:copper scaffold:route -handler=HandleSubmitPage -path=/submit app
Open
pkg/app/router.go and edit the newly created HandleSubmitPage function to render the submit.html page:func (ro *Router) HandleSubmitPage(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
ro.rw.WriteHTML(w, r, chttp.WriteHTMLParams{
PageTemplate: "submit.html",
})
}
Create a new file
web/src/pages/submit.html with the following markup:{{ define "title" }}
Submit
{{ end }}
{{ define "links" }}
{{ end }}
{{ define "content" }}
<form method="post" action="/submit">
<table class="text-sm table-fixed">
<tr>
<td class="py-1">
<label for="title" class="text-neutral-500">title</label>
</td>
<td>
<input id="title" name="title" type="text" class="border border-black w-64 px-1" />
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="py-1">
<label for="url" class="text-neutral-500">url</label>
</td>
<td>
<input id="url" name="url" type="text" class="border border-black w-64 px-1" />
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="py-1"></td>
<td>
<button type="submit" class="bg-gray-100 border border-black text-sm px-2">
submit
</button>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
</form>
{{ end }}
Notice that the markup includes an HTML form that makes a
POST request to the /submit endpoint with title and urlas the form values.Open http://localhost:5901/submit in your browser and play around with the page. For now, hitting submit won't work because we don't have a route handler for submissions.
Let's set up a storage layer that can save user submissions into our database. We'll keep this logic in a new package called
posts:copper scaffold:pkg posts
copper scaffold:queries posts
The above commands create the
pkg/posts package as well as a pkg/posts/queries.go that we can use to implement our SQL queries.Before we make any SQL queries, let's create the
Post model and its database migration:Open up
pkg/posts/models.go and define the Post model:type Post struct {
ID string
Title string
URL string
Poster string
}
Then, open up
migrations/0001_initial.sql and define its database schema:-- +migrate Up
create table if not exists posts
(
id text primary key,
title text,
url text,
poster text
);
-- +migrate Down
drop table posts;
In your terminal, run
copper migrate to create the table.Now that we have a
Post model and a posts table in our database, we can write queries in the pkg/posts/queries.go file. Add the following SavePost method that can be used to insert a new entry into the posts table:func (q *Queries) SavePost(ctx context.Context, post *Post) error {
const query = "INSERT INTO posts (id, title, url, poster) values (?, ?, ?, ?)"
_, err := q.querier.Exec(ctx, query,
post.ID,
post.Title,
post.URL,
post.Poster,
)
return err
}
Now, let's head over to
pkg/app/router.go and use the SavePost method to handle form submissions.Wire
*posts.Queries dependency on the Router:type NewRouterParams struct {
Posts *posts.Queries
...
}
func NewRouter(p NewRouterParams) *Router {
return &Router{
posts: p.Posts,
...
}
}
type Router struct {
posts *posts.Queries
...
}
Create a new route handler to handle user submissions. In your terminal, run this command:
copper scaffold:route -handler=HandleSubmitPost -method=Post -path=/submit app
Back in your
pkg/app/router.gofile, implement the HandleSubmitPost method like so:func (ro *Router) HandleSubmitPost(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
var (
title = strings.TrimSpace(r.PostFormValue("title"))
url = strings.TrimSpace(r.PostFormValue("url"))
)
if title == "" || url == "" {
ro.rw.WriteHTMLError(w, r, cerrors.New(nil, "invalid post", map[string]interface{}{
"form": r.Form,
}))
return
}
err := ro.posts.SavePost(r.Context(), &posts.Post{
ID: uuid.New().String(), // Import "github.com/google/uuid
Title: title,
URL: url,
Poster: "user1",
})
if err != nil {
ro.rw.WriteHTMLError(w, r, cerrors.New(err, "failed to save post", map[string]interface{}{
"form": r.Form,
}))
return
}
http.Redirect(w, r, "/", http.StatusSeeOther)
}
Now, your submit page should work! Click submit will make a new entry into the
posts table.On the home page, we want to show a list of all posts that exist in the database. Let's start with creating a new SQL query and work our way up from there. In
pkg/posts/queries.go, add the following method to list all posts:func (q *Queries) ListPosts(ctx context.Context) ([]Post, error) {
const query = "SELECT id, title, url, poster FROM posts"
var (
posts []Post
err = q.querier.Select(ctx, &posts, query)
)
return posts, err
}
Edit the
HandleIndexPage method in pkg/app/router.go to query all posts and pass it to the HTML template:func (ro *Router) HandleIndexPage(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
allPosts, err := ro.posts.ListPosts(r.Context())
if err != nil {
ro.rw.WriteHTMLError(w, r, cerrors.New(err, "failed to list posts", nil))
return
}
ro.rw.WriteHTML(w, r, chttp.WriteHTMLParams{
PageTemplate: "index.html",
Data: map[string][]posts.Post{
"Posts": allPosts,
},
})
}
Now, edit
web/src/pages/index.html to make use of the data and render the posts:{{ define "content" }}
<div class="flex-col space-y-2">
{{ range .Posts }}
<div class="flex space-x-0.5 text-sm text-neutral-400">
<div>x.</div>
<div>
<form method="post" action="/posts/{{ .ID }}/vote">
<button type="submit" class="cursor">
<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" class="h-5 w-5" viewBox="0 0 20 20" fill="currentColor">
<path fill-rule="evenodd" d="M14.707 12.707a1 1 0 01-1.414 0L10 9.414l-3.293 3.293a1 1 0 01-1.414-1.414l4-4a1 1 0 011.414 0l4 4a1 1 0 010 1.414z" clip-rule="evenodd" />
</svg>
</button>
</form>
</div>
<div>
<div>
<span class="text-black">
<a href="{{ .URL }}" target="_blank">{{ .Title }}</a>
</span>
<span class="text-[10px]">{{ .URL }}</span>
</div>
<div class="leading-3 text-[10px]">x votes by {{ .Poster }}</div>
</div>
</div>
{{ end }}
</div>
{{ end }}
Once you make a few submissions, you should see a page similar to this:
Hacker News Clone
The voting and ranking is an exercise left to the reader. Both of these features use similar patterns to what was used in this guide.
If you need help, head over to https://github.com/gocopper/examples/tree/main/hackernews to see a working example.
Last modified 9mo ago