Urchin 🐚

Urchin is a headless CMS (Content Management System) written in Golang, designed to be fast, efficient, and easily extensible. It allows you to create a website or blog, with any template you like, in only a few commands.

Features 🚀

• Headless Architecture: Adding pages, posts, or forms should all be done with easy requests to the API.
• Golang-Powered: Leverage the performance and safety of one of the best languages in the market for backend development.
• SQL Database Integration: Store your posts and pages in SQL databases for reliable and scalable data storage.
• Post: We can add, update, and delete posts. Posts can be served through a unique URL.
• Pages: TODO.
• Menus: TODO
• Live Reload through the use of air.

Installation

Ensure you have Golang installed on your system before proceeding with the installation.

go get -u github.com/username/urchin

Example - Running the App

First, ensure you have the neccesary libraries to run the application

make install-tools

Following that, make sure you run the Goose migrations for the database. We recommend creating a database called urchin and running the following command:

GOOSE_DRIVER="mysql" GOOSE_DBSTRING="root:root@/gocms" goose up

Replace the database connection string with the appropriate string dependending on where your database is.

After you've replaced the default template files with your prefered template, simply build and start the app with the following commands.

go build
./urchin

This will start Urchin on http://localhost:8080. You can customize the configuration by providing the necessary environment variables.

For more information, see the configuration settings.

Example - Running with Docker Compose

To run with docker-compose, use the following command:

docker-compose up

This will start two containers: one containing the urchin app, serving on port 8080, and another one serving the mariadb database internally. This will also run the migrations automatically to setup the database!

Architecture

Currently, the architecture of urchin is still in its early days. The plan is to have two main applications: the public facing application to serve the content through a website, and the admin application that can be hidden, where users can modify the settings, add posts, pages, etc.

In the above image, you can see the two applications running alongside, and they share a database connection where the data is actually stored. The list below explains some of the data intended to be stored in the database:

• posts: a table where each row is an individual post, containing the title, content, and any other relevant data.
• pages: a table where HTML can be stored to be served as individual pages on a website.
• cards: Still TODO. Need to decide how this will allow users to display menu-like pages with cards.

Dependencies

Urchin relies on the following Golang dependencies:

• Gin as the web framework for Golang.
• ZeroLog for logging.

Configuration

The runtime configuration is handled through reading the necessary environment variables. This approach was chosen as it makes integrating envfiles quite easy.

The following list outlines the environment variables needed.

• URCHIN_DATABASE_ADDRESS should contain the database addres, e.g. localhost.
• URCHIN_DATABASE_PORT should be the connection port to the database. For example 3306.
• URCHIN_DATABASE_USER is the database username.
• URCHIN_DATABASE_PASSWORD needs to contain the database password for the given user.

License

Urchin is released under the MIT License. See LICENSE (TODO) for details. Feel free to fork, modify, and use it in your projects!