Cybertown Revival

This project is an attempt to resurrect and preserve Cybertown, a VRML based community from the mid-90s/early-00s. This repository contains the entire codebase for the new platform, built by the community.

How to Contribute

As a Developer

We always welcome others to help out with VRML and the Single Page Application (SPA) and API. Take a look at our issue, fork this repository and start contributing. When you are ready, create a pull request, and we will review your changes to be merged into the official master branch.

As a User

Submitting bugs, feedback and commenting on issues is the best way for non-developers to help with the project.

Dev Stack

• Node.js
• Vue.js
• Tailwind.css
• MySQL
• Nginx
• socket.io
• docker
• VRML

Development Environment Setup Instructions

We utilise docker to manage the entire development environment and to make it easy to set up and run.

Requirements

You will need to have the following already installed on your machine and a basic understanding in order to run the development environment:

• node/npm (version 14.18.1)
• docker

You may also wish to install Docker for Desktop if you wish. For beginners, there are plenty of tutorials and videos online on installation and the basics of node, npm and docker.

Initial Setup

1. Clone this repository to your machine.
2. Rename spa/.env.example to spa/.env and api/.env.example to api/.env.
3. In the cloned directory, run docker-compose up from command line. This will install the docker environment, install node dependencies via npm and start the servers.
4. Navigate to the spa/ directory and run npm run dev to compile the SPA.
5. In your browser, visit http://localhost:8001/ to confirm it's running.

To run the environment again in the future, simple repeat steps 2 onwards.

Creating the database

To initialize a database within the mysql container, run the command below from within the api/ directory.

Running this will create a new database using settings configured in api/knexfile.ts:

npm run db:init

After the database is created, the schema and some necessary seed data are created automatically.

Automatically Compiling the SPA

When making changes to the SPA, provided you have ran npm run dev from spa/ all your changes will be automatically re-compiled.

Coding Standards

• 2 space indentation
• 100-110 max line length
• wrapped lines can have +1 space indentation
• use single quotes for strings, excluding SQL queries.
• use triple equals (===) for comparisons
• no trailing spaces
• always leave a trailing (,) comma in lists
• blank line at the end of files