Twitter Clone

This is a Mini Twitter Clone application developed using Hexagon, based on this Spark tutorial. It makes use of Pebble to render pages, and MongoDB for database functions.

Requirements

• Java + Kotlin
• Gradle
• MongoDB

How to run

Navigate to the project's root folder and run the following commands in order

1. ./gradlew build
2. ./gradlew installDist
3. ./gradlew run

Open http://localhost:2010/ in your browser.

General Functionality

• Sign up and register
• Public and personal timelines
• Follow/unfollow users
• User pages

Architecture

The main class, which starts the server, is Application.kt.

The models package contains the models to be stored in the database.

The routes package contains the routing logic files.

Utils.kt contains some general-purpose helper methods used in other parts of the application.

Inside resources, the templates folder contains the Pebble templates used to render webpages. base.html contains some common components such as the navbar, and other templates extend from this file.

The service.yaml file defines several local settings such as the server port number, MongoDB URL, etc. This can be modified, if required, based on local settings.

Endpoints

Note: for all POST endpoints, data is expected in the form of form parameters (x-www-form-url-encoded).

ANY /ping

A simple ping endpoint to check if the server is up and running.

GET /

The homepage. If no user is logged in, this redirects to /public, else a feed of messages of users followed by the currently logged in user is shown.

GET /public

Shows the list of messages from all users.

GET /register

Renders the registration page.

POST /register

Registers the user.

Expected data:

• username
• email
• password

If registration is successful, redirects to /login.

GET /login

Renders the login page.

POST /login

Logs the user in. Logged in users are tracked using Session variables.

Expected data:

• email
• password

If login is successful, redirects to the home page (/).

GET /logout

Logs the user out and redirects to the home page (/).

GET /user/follow/:username

Adds the currently logged in user as a follower of the user specified in the path.

GET /user/unfollow/:username

Removes the currently logged in user from the list of followers of the user specified in the path.

GET /user/:username

Renders the user page, containing the feed of messages sent by the user.

POST /message

Creates a message and associates it with the currently logged in user.

Expected data:

• message

If successful, redirects to the public timeline (/public).