Gator

About The Project

Gator is a CLI RSS/blog aggregator that stores feeds and posts in PostgreSQL.

This project was completed as part of the Boot.dev backend curriculum. While the core architecture followed a guided specification, I personally implemented the database migrations and the concurrent scraping logic.

Built With

• TypeScript
• Node.js
• PostgreSQL
• Drizzle ORM

Getting Started

To get a local copy up and running follow these steps.

Prerequisites

• npm

  npm install npm@latest -g

• Postgres
  • macOS with brew

  brew install postgresql@16

  • Linux / WSL (Debian). Docs for WSL:

  sudo apt update
  sudo apt install postgresql postgresql-contrib

  Confirm installation worked:

  psql --version

  (Linux only) Update postgres password:

  sudo passwd postgres

Installation

1. Clone the repo

   git clone https://github.com/useradamlee/Gator.git

2. Install NPM packages

   npm install

3. Get connection string to postgres database. Format:

   protocol://username:password@host:port/database
   

   Examples:
   • macOS (no password, your username): postgres://adamlee:@localhost:5432/gator
   • Linux (password from last lesson, postgres user): postgres://postgres:postgres@localhost:5432/gator
4. Enter the psql shell:

• Mac: psql postgres
• Linux: sudo -u postgres psql

5. Create the database:

   CREATE DATABASE gator;

6. Connect to the database:

   \c gator

7. Set the user password (Linux only):

   ALTER USER postgres PASSWORD 'postgres';

   postgres was used as the password for simplicity
8. You can type exit or use \q to leave the psql shell.
9. Create a config file in your home directory ~/.gatorconfig.json Add an additional sslmode=disable query string:

   {
     "db_url": "protocol://username:password@host:port/database?sslmode=disable"
   }
   

Running Gator

Run the CLI with:

npm run start

Example commands

Register a user:

npm run start register adam

Add a feed:

npm run start addfeed "Boot.dev Blog" https://blog.boot.dev/index.xml

Follow a feed:

npm run start follow https://blog.boot.dev/index.xml

Browse posts:

npm run start browse

Full list of commands

• login <username> - log in as an existing user
• users - list all users
• agg <time_between_reqs> - scrape feeds every given interval
• following - list all the feeds the user is currently following
• register <username> - create a new user
• login <username> - log in as a user
• addfeed <name> <url> - add a new feed
• follow <url> - follow a feed
• unfollow <url> - unfollow a feed
• browse [limit] - browse recent posts, optionally limiting the number shown