Plainchant

Plainchant is a lightweight and libre imageboard software package.

Goals

• Practical - the software should be fully-featured and polished such that it can be used for real-world public imageboards.

• Robust - the software should be thoughtfully engineered and take the right choices, not the easy ones.

• Efficient - all aspects of the system should be fast and use system resources frugally.

• Minimalist - the front-end should be minimally designed. The web markup should be handwritten, thoughtful, and semantically meaningful. The site should not use JavaScript, and be viewable even in a text-mode browser.

• Modern - minimalism does not mean stuck in the past. Elegant and modern technologies should be employed throughout the project.

• Familiar - the software should employ the conventions of existing imageboards to ensure familiarity

Non-goals

• Compatibility - the software should not compromise on elegance for the sake of supporting obsolete environments or to perfectly copy existing imageboards

• Webscale - the software is intended for small and medium size communities. It should scale respectably, but is not designed to effortlessly host the next Reddit.

Technologies

Plainchant is written in Rust. It uses the Axum web framework and the SQLite database.

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Running Plainchant

The following steps describe a convenient way of setting up Plainchant for local development. Note that all directories specified here are recommendations and that others may be used, provided the config file plainchant.toml is updated appropriately.

1. Create a directory /etc/plainchant, and into it copy from this repository the file example/plainchant.toml and the folders templates and static. †

2. Create a directory /var/lib/plainchant and within it the subdirectory fsfr.

3. Ensure that the user that you intend to run the server has read access to /etc/plainchant/ and read-write access to /var/lib/plainchant/

4. To create the database at /var/lib/plainchant/db.sqlite3, run plainchant, either with cargo run or by invoking the binary directly. You need provide just one argument, the path to the site config file - if you have exactly followed the directions above, that's /etc/plainchant/plainchant.toml.

5. Using a tool of your choice, add each board that you wish to serve into the Boards table of the sqlite3 database. The schema is (BoardId, Url, Title, PostCap, BumpLimit, NextPostNum). For example:

   INSERT INTO Boards VALUES (1234, 'mu', 'Music', 20, 100, 10000);

6. Using a tool of your choice, update the singleton row in the Site table of the database with a site name and description of your choice. For example:

   REPLACE INTO Site VALUES (1, 'sandcastlechan', 'An imageboard all about sandcastles.', '[email protected]', 'https://sandcastlechan.net');

7. You can now run plainchant. By default it runs on localhost:8088.

† You may find it useful to symlink these directories to your local copy of the repository for ease-of-hacking