• Stacker News moderates forums with money
• What You See is What We Ship (look ma, I invented an initialism)
• 100% FOSS
• We pay bitcoin for PRs, issues, documentation, code reviews and more
• Next.js, postgres, graphql, and lnd

Launch a fully featured SN development environment in a single command.

$ ./sndev start

Go to localhost:3000.

• Clone the repo
  • ssh: git clone git@github.com:stackernews/stacker.news.git
  • https: git clone https://github.com/stackernews/stacker.news.git
• Install docker
  • If you're running MacOS or Windows, I highly recommend using OrbStack instead of Docker Desktop
• Please make sure that at least 10 GB of free space is available, otherwise you may encounter issues while setting up the development environment.

You can run Stacker News on Github Codespaces

1. Open the repository on GitHub and click the "Code" button
2. Select the Codespaces tab and create a new codespace.
   • You can also configure your codespace to run select services based on COMPOSE_PROFILES as well as in a different region and machine type by clicking "..." and selecting "New with options...". Check Modifying services for more information on COMPOSE_PROFILES
3. Wait for the environment to set up (this may take several minutes the first time)
4. Once ready, you'll see a terminal with the environment initialized

After the codespace is created, the development environment will be automatically set up and services started.

Access your running application at the URL shown in the forwarded ports panel (typically https://your-codespace-name-3000.app.github.dev).

⚠️ Important: For various internal services and external access to work properly, you must set forwarded ports to Public in the Ports tab:

1. In your codespace, look for the "PORTS" tab in the bottom panel
2. Click the lock icon to change visibility from "Private" to "Public"

Start the development environment

$ ./sndev start

View all available commands

$ ./sndev help

                            888
                            888
                            888
      .d8888b  88888b.  .d88888  .d88b.  888  888
     88K      888 '88b d88' 888 d8P  Y8b 888  888
     'Y8888b. 888  888 888  888 88888888 Y88  88P
          X88 888  888 Y88b 888 Y8b.      Y8bd8P
      88888P' 888  888  'Y88888  'Y8888    Y88P

manages a docker based stacker news development environment

USAGE
  $ sndev [COMMAND]
  $ sndev help [COMMAND]

COMMANDS
  help                    show help

  env:
    start                 start env
    stop                  stop env
    restart               restart env
    status                status of env
    logs                  logs from env
    delete                delete env

  sn:
    login                 login as a nym
    set_balance           set the balance of a nym

  lightning:
    fund                   pay a bolt11 for funding
    withdraw               create a bolt11 for withdrawal

  db:
    psql                   open psql on db
    prisma                 run prisma commands

  domains:
    domains                custom domains dev management

  dev:
    pr                     fetch and checkout a pr
    lint                   run linters
    test                   run tests

  other:
    cli                    service cli passthrough
    open                   open service GUI in browser
    onion                  service onion address
    cert                   service tls cert
    compose                docker compose passthrough

By default all services will be run. If you want to exclude specific services from running, set COMPOSE_PROFILES in a .env.local file to one or more of minimal,images,search,payments,wallets,email,capture,domains,domains-caddy. To only run minimal necessary without things like payments in .env.local:

COMPOSE_PROFILES=minimal

To run with images and payments services:

COMPOSE_PROFILES=images,payments

By default sndev start will merge docker-compose.yml with docker-compose.override.yml. Specify any overrides you want to merge with docker-compose.override.yml.

For example, if you want to replace the db seed with a custom seed file located in docker/db/another.sql, you'd create a docker-compose.override.yml file with the following:

services:
  db:
    volumes:
      - ./docker/db/another.sql:/docker-entrypoint-initdb.d/seed.sql

You can read more about docker compose override files.

Semantic search is now enabled automatically in dev when the search profile is active.

• Ensure search is in COMPOSE_PROFILES:

  COMPOSE_PROFILES=...,search,...

• Start your environment with ./sndev start.

• On first boot, OpenSearch downloads and deploys the embedding model, then creates a neural-ready index. This can take a couple minutes.

No manual script run or container restart is required for the default setup.

If you need to manually repair or recreate semantic search resources, restart from a fresh dev volume with ./sndev delete and then run ./sndev start.

To enable dnsmasq:

• domains should be enabled in COMPOSE_PROFILES:

  COMPOSE_PROFILES=...,domains,...

To add/remove DNS records you can now use ./sndev domains dns. More on this here.

The domains profile enables dnsmasq and custom-domain worker jobs. The bundled Caddy HTTPS proxy is separate in domains-caddy, so you can keep local domain verification while omitting Caddy if an external TLS-terminating load balancer handles your dev domains.

• Getting started
  • Installation
    • GitHub Codespaces
  • Usage
    • Modifying services
      • Running specific services
      • Merging compose files
• Contributing
  • We pay bitcoin for contributions
  • Pull request awards
  • Code review awards
  • Issue specification awards
  • Responsible disclosure of security or privacy vulnerability awards
  • Development documentation awards
  • Helpfulness awards
• Contribution extras
  • Dev chat
  • Triage permissions
  • Contributor badges on SN profiles
  • What else you got
• Development Tips
  • Linting
  • Database migrations
  • Connecting to the local database
  • Running lncli on the local lnd nodes
  • Testing local auth
    • Login with Email
    • Login with Github
    • Login with Lightning
  • Enabling web push notifications
• Internals
  • Stack
  • Services
  • Wallet transaction safety
• Need help?
• Responsible Disclosure
• License

We want your help.

• pull requests closing existing issues
• code review
• issue specification whether for bugs, features, or enhancements
• discovery of security vulnerabilities
• discovery of privacy vulnerabilities
• improvements to development documentation
• helpfulness

View a current list of granted awards

This document in no way legally entitles you to payments for contributions, entitles you to being a contributor, or entitles you to the attention of other contributors. This document lays out the system we can use to determine contribution awards which we generally intend to abide by but importantly we reserve the right to refuse payments or contributions, modify rules and award amounts, make exceptions to rules or reward amounts, and withhold awards for any reason at anytime, even just for the heck of it, at our sole discretion. If you need more certainty than what I've just described, don't participate. We provide awards as an experiment to make FOSS less sucky.

1. PRs closing an issue will be awarded according to the difficulty tag on an issue, e.g. difficulty:easy pays 100k sats.
2. Issues are occasionally marked with a priority tag which multiplies the award of a PR closing an issue, e.g. an issue marked with priority:high and difficulty:hard awards 2m sats.
3. An award is reduced by 10% of the award amount for each substantial change requested to the PR on code review, e.g. if two changes are requested on a PR closing an issue tagged with difficulty:hard, 800k sats will be awarded.
   • Reductions are applied before priority multipliers, e.g. a PR closing a priority:high and difficulty:hard issue that's approved after two changes are requested awards 1.6m sats.
   • You are responsible for understanding the issue and requirements before requesting review on a PR.
   • There is no award reduction for asking specific questions on the issue itself or on the PR before requesting review
   • There is no award reduction for asking more general questions in a discussion
4. A PR must be merged by an SN engineer before a PR receives an award

Due to Rule 3, make sure that you mark your PR as a draft when you create it and it's not ready for review yet.

We try to assign difficulty and priority tags to issues accurately, but we're not perfect. If you believe an issue is mis-tagged, you can request a change to the issue's tags.

Code reviewers will be awarded the amount their code review reduced from the PR author's reward, e.g. two substantial problems/areas of improvement identified in a PR closing a priority:high and difficulty:hard issue awards 400k sats.

1. The problem or improvement must be acknowledged as such by SN engineers explicitly
2. A PR must be merged by an SN engineer before a PR's code reviewers receive an award

Code review approvals are more than welcome, but we can't guarantee awards for them because the work performed to approve a PR is unverifiable.

Issue specifiers will be awarded up to 10% of a PR award for issues resulting in a PR being merged by an SN engineer that closes the issue. In addition to being subject to PR award amounts and reductions, specification amounts are awarded on the basis of how much additional help and specification is required by other contributors.

1. The issue must directly result in PR being merged by an SN engineer that closes the issue
2. Issue specification award amounts are based on the final PR award amounts
   • that is, they are subject to PR award code review reductions and priority multipliers
3. Award amounts will be reduced on the basis of how much additional help and specification is required by other contributors
4. Issue specifiers who can close their own issues with their own PRs are also eligible for this 10%
   • e.g an issue tagged as difficulty:hard that is both specified and closed by a PR from the same contributor without changes requested awards 1.1m sats

For example: a specified issue that's tagged as difficulty:hard, doesn't require additional specification and disambiguation by other contributors, and results in PR being merged without changes requested awards the issue specifier 100k sats.

Awards for responsible disclosures are assessed on the basis of:

1. the potential loss resulting from an exploit of the vulnerability
2. the trivialness of exploiting the vulnerability
3. the disclosure's detail

Award amounts will be easiest to assess on a case by case basis. Upon confirmation of a vulnerability, we agree to award responsible disclosures at minimum 100k sats and as high as the total potential loss that would result from exploiting the vulnerability.

1. Disclosure is responsible and does not increase the likelihood of an exploit.
2. Disclosure includes steps to reproduce.
3. Disclosure includes a realistic attack scenario with prerequisites for an attack and expected gains after the exploitation. Disclosures without such scenario, with unrealistic assumptions or without meaningful outcomes will not be eligible for awards.
4. You must be the first person to responsibly disclose the issue to be eligible for awards.

For significant changes to documentation, create an issue before making said changes. In such cases we will award documentation improvements in accordance with issue specification and PR awards.

For changes on the order of something like a typo, we'll award a nominal amount at our discretion.

Like issue specification awards, helping fellow contributors substantially in a well documented manner such that the helped fellow contributes a merged PR is eligible for a one-time relative reward.

We want to make contributing to SN as rewarding as possible, so we offer a few extras to contributors.

We self-host a private chat server for contributors to SN. If you'd like to join, please respond in this discussion.

We offer triage permissions to contributors after they've made a few contributions. I'll usually add them as I notice people contributing, but if I missed you and you'd like to be added, let me know!

Contributors can get badges on their SN profiles by opening a pull request adding their SN nym to the contributors.txt file.

In the future we plan to offer more, like gratis github copilot subscriptions, reverse tunnels, codespaces, and merch.

If you'd like to see something added, please make a suggestion.

We use JavaScript Standard Style to enforce code style and correctness. You should run sndev lint before submitting a PR.

If you're using VSCode, you can install the StandardJS VSCode Extension extension to get linting in your editor. We also recommend installing StandardJS code snippets and StandardJS react code snippets for code snippets.

We use prisma for our database migrations. To create a new migration, modify prisma/schema.prisma according to prisma schema reference and apply it with:

./sndev prisma migrate dev

If you want to create a migration without applying it, eg to create a trigger or modify the generated sql before applying, use the --create-only option:

./sndev prisma migrate dev --create-only

Generate the local copy of the prisma ORM client in node_modules after changes. This should only be needed to get Intellisense in your editor locally.

./sndev prisma generate

You can connect to the local database via ./sndev psql. psql is an interactive terminal for working with PostgreSQL.

You can run lncli on the local lnd nodes via ./sndev cli lnd and ./sndev cli sn_lnd. The node for your local SN instance is sn_lnd and the node serving as any external node, like a stacker's node or external wallet, is lnd.

You can run lightning-cli on the local cln node via ./sndev cli cln which serves as an external node or wallet.

You can login to test features like posting, replying, tipping, etc with ./sndev login <nym> which will provide a link to login as an existing nym or a new account for a nonexistent nym. But, it you want to test auth specifically you'll need to configure them in your .env file.

• The app is already prepared to send emails through MailHog so no extra configuration is needed
• Click "sign up" and enter any email address (remember, it's not going anywhere beyond your workstation)
• Access MailHog's web UI on http://localhost:8025
• Click the link (looks like this):

http://localhost:3000/api/auth/callback/email?email=satoshi%40gmail.com&token=110e30a954ce7ca643379d90eb511640733de405f34a31b38eeda8e254d48cd7

• Create a Sendgrid account (or other smtp service)

LOGIN_EMAIL_SERVER=smtp://apikey:<sendgrid_api_key>@smtp.sendgrid.net:587
LOGIN_EMAIL_FROM=<sendgrid_email_from>

• Click "sign up" and enter your email address
• Check your email
• Click the link (looks like this):

http://localhost:3000/api/auth/callback/email?email=satoshi%40gmail.com&token=110e30a954ce7ca643379d90eb511640733de405f34a31b38eeda8e254d48cd7

• Create a new OAuth app in your Github account
  • Set the callback URL to: http://localhost:3000/api/auth/callback/github
• Update your .env file

GITHUB_ID=<Client ID>
GITHUB_SECRET=<Client secret>

• Signup and login as above

• Use ngrok to create a HTTPS tunnel to localhost:3000
• Update LNAUTH_URL in .env with the URL provided by ngrok and add /api/lnauth to it

To enable Web Push locally, you will need to set the VAPID_* env vars. VAPID_MAILTO needs to be an email address using the mailto: scheme. For NEXT_PUBLIC_VAPID_PUBKEY and VAPID_PRIVKEY, you can run npx web-push generate-vapid-keys.

A worker dedicated to verifying custom domains, checks, among other things, if a domain has the correct DNS records and values. This would normally require a real domain and access to its DNS configuration. Therefore we use dnsmasq to have local DNS, make sure you have enabled it.

If you access local custom domains through the bundled Caddy proxy, keep domains-caddy enabled too. If you use your own TLS-terminating load balancer, it should forward X-Forwarded-Proto: https so dev cookies that depend on secure requests are marked Secure.

To add a DNS record the syntax is the following:

./sndev domains dns add|remove cname|txt <name/domain> <value>

For TXT records, you can also use "" quoted strings on value.

To list all DNS records present in the dnsmasq config: ./sndev domains dns list

sndev will use the dnsmasq DNS server by default, but chances are that you might want to access the domain via your browser.

For every edit on dnsmasq, it will give you the option to either edit the /etc/hosts file or use the dnsmasq DNS server which can be reached on 127.0.0.1:5353. You can avoid getting asked to edit the /etc/hosts file by adding the --no-hosts parameter.

The site is written in javascript (not typescript 😱) using Next.js, a React framework. The backend API is provided via GraphQL. The database is PostgreSQL modeled with Prisma. The job queue is also maintained in PostgreSQL. We use lnd for our lightning node. A customized Bootstrap theme is used for styling.

Currently, SN runs and maintains two significant services and one microservice:

1. the nextjs web app, found in ./
2. the worker service, found in ./worker, which runs periodic jobs and jobs sent to it by the web app
3. a screenshot microservice, found in ./capture, which takes screenshots of SN for social previews

In addition, we run other critical services the above services interact with like lnd, postgres, opensearch, tor, and s3.

To ensure stackers balances are kept sane, some wallet updates are run in serializable transactions at the database level. Because early versions of prisma had relatively poor support for transactions most wallet touching code is written in plpgsql stored procedures and can be found in the prisma/migrations folder.

UPDATE: Most wallet updates are now run in read committed transactions. See api/payIn/README.md for more information.

Open a discussion or issue or email us or request joining the dev chat.

If you found a vulnerability, we would greatly appreciate it if you contact us via security@stacker.news or open a security advisory. Our PGP key can be found here (FEE1 E768 E0B3 81F5).

MIT