Longbox

The comic book collection community!

Welcome to the Longbox codebase, the platform that powers comic book collectors to track their reading habits across various platforms. This code is a work in progress and should be considered unstable, untested, and unsupported. With your help, we can build out Longbox's usability, scalability, and stability to better serve our community.

What is Longbox?

Longbox is open source software for allowing comic book fans to organize their collection and track their reading habits. Users can browse for new books and discover new things to read.

Future ideas and enhancements include:

• Create and share lists of books.
• Track a pull list of upcoming releases.
• Graph purchases and spending over time.
• Identify trending writers and artists in their collection.

Getting Started

Note: For development purposes, PostgreSQL runs in a docker container. In production, PostgreSQL should run in its own environment and the config/database.yml file should be updated.

We run on a Rails backend, a PostgreSQL database, with a React frontend written in TypeScript.

Installing to your local machine can be troublesome for many reasons such as a conflicting database and runtime versions. The best way to get a development environment up and running is with containers. They will set up everything you need in an isolated environment, and you need not worry about the details of setting everything up locally.

Containers

Prerequisites

• Docker 20.10.5 or higher
• Docker Compose 1.27.4 or higher

Setting up Longbox for local development

1. Fork our repository, e.g. https://github.com/darylf/longbox/fork

2. Clone your forked repository, eg. git clone https://github.com/{your-username}/longbox.git

3. Configure the docker build environment by editing the .env file in the root directory. These settings configure which ports are exposed to the host machine.

   ## API
   LONGBOX_API_PORT=3001
   LONGBOX_DB_PORT=5432
   
   ## Web
   LONGBOX_WEB_PORT=3000
   
   ## Proxy
   LONGBOX_PROXY_PORT=80
   LONGBOX_PROXY_PORT_SSL=443

4. Configure your environment variables/secrets. The entire config directory is ignored in git.

   1. Create /config/api.env and add the following block (note: values are examples only):

      RUBY_VERSION="3.0.2"
      DATABASE_URL=postgres://postgres:@db
      DATABASE_NAME=longbox
      DATABASE_USERNAME=postgres
      DATABASE_PASSWORD=postgres
      RAILS_ENV=development
      RAILS_MASTER_KEY=1234567890abcdef1234567890abcdef
      SECRET_KEY_BASE=1234567890abcdef1234567890abcdef1234567890abcdef1234567890abcdef1234567890abcdef1234567890abcdef1234567890abcdef1234567890abcdef

   2. Create /config/db.env and add the following block (note: values are examples only):

      POSTGRES_USERNAME=postgres
      POSTGRES_PASSWORD=postgres

Running Longbox locally

1. Run make build-local
2. Run make up-local
3. Run make logs-local
4. Navigate to http://localhost

Note: you can also run multiple commands in make, such as: make build-local up-local logs-local

Core team

• @darylfritz

Acknowledgments

Thank you to the Line Awesome project for the usage of their icons.

License

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the MIT License as published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Please see the LICENSE file in our repository for the full text.