Thoughts Journal 2 (TJ2)

Description

A journaling server that allows for storing various kinds of data on a daily basis. The starting idea of the server was tracking data for mental health reasons and to then share that data with Therapists / Psychiatrist. That goal is still present but is not the only use case and can be used for other things that require tracking data on a daily basis. This is a reimplementation of a previous attempt that can be found here.

Features:

• Multiple journals
• Storing text / audio / video for journal entries
• File uploads
• Tags with optional values
• MFA
  • TOTP
  • U2F
  • Passkey
• Synchronizing journals between servers
• Email support (notifications, invites, logins, etc)
• Notifications
• Single Sign On (SSO)

Work In Progress

This is not ready for production use and there is still a lot of work needed to be done.

Setup / Build

Work will needs to be done do make the setup process easier to manage and not have it be as manual.

Requirements

The current versions of software are required in order to run / build the server and frontend (previous or newer versions may work but have not been tested).

• Rust (1.81.0)
• PostgreSQL (17)
• NodeJS (22.9.0)

all of the library dependencies will be handle by either cargo or npm when building the server or frontend.

the server will require a private key and certificate as development has been done using HTTPS and sessions may not work properly in the browser without it. OpenSSL (3.2.0) was used the generate the localhost certs and the commands used can be found in the /certs directory of the project.

Directories

The server will require the following directories do be present during runtime in order to function.

• /data: data the server will storing during operation
• /storage: user specific information such as uploaded files
• /storage/journals: any uploaded data for a specific journal. the directory will contain the id of the journal with an additional subdirectory for storing the files attached to the journal.

These directories must be made manually as of right now and can be made in the root of the project for convienience.

Building

At the root of the project the following commands can be run to build all the necessary files that are required for the server to run.

• cargo build this will download all the necessary packges for the server and then create a debug build of the server
• npm install downloads all the necessary packages for the frontend build process
• npm run build-tsx builds the frontend Typescript and JSX (ReactJS) files for the user interface
• npm run build-css builds the necessary CSS files for styling the user interface

Database

There is a database configuration file in the /db/postgres/init.sql that creates all the necessary information for the server. Here is a list of commands that are used to setup the database

$ psql -U postgres
postgres# create database tj2;
postgres# \c tj2
postgres# \i db/postgres/init.sql
postgres# \q

this must be run at the root of the project in order for the path to the init.sql to be properly resolved.

Configuration

The server will require a configuration file at runtime to specify any relevant information needed during operation. All relative paths will be resolved to the parent directory of the config file being loaded.

# any additional configuration files to load befor processing this file
preload = [
    "./frontend/assets.config.toml"
]

# specifies the directory for the server to store information that is
# needed during operation
#
# defaults to "{CWD}/data"
data = "./data"

# specifies the directory for the server to store user information that
# is created during operation
#
# defaults to "{CWD}/storage"
storage = "./storage"

# the number of asynchronous threads that tokio will use for the thread
# pool.
#
# defaults to 1
thread_pool = 1

# the number of blocking threads that tokio will use for synchronous
# operations.
#
# defaults to 1
blocking_pool = 1

# the list of available listeners for the server to use
[[listeners]]
# the ipv4/ipv6 ip and port for the server to listen on
addr = "0.0.0.0:8080"

[[listeners]]
addr = "[::]:8443"

# additional tls information for the specific listener to use
[listeners.tls]
# the specified path of the private key to use
key = "./certs/localhost.ecdsa.key"
# the speicifed path of the certificate to use
cert = "./certs/localhost.ecdsa.crt"

# configuration information for connecting to the database
[db]
# the user for connecting to the database
#
# defaults to "postgres"
user = "postgres"

# the optional password for the user
#
# defaults to None
password = "password"

# the hostname of the database
#
# defaults to "localhost"
host = "localhost"

# the port the database is listening on
#
# defaults to 5432
port = 5432

# the name of the database to connect to
#
# defaults to "tj2"
dbname = "tj2"

The /frontend directory contains the UI information that the server will need in order to serve frontend to a user so it must be specified in the preload path list.

example that the server uses when running

preload = [
    "./frontend/assets.config.toml"
]

[[listeners]]
addr = "0.0.0.0:8080"

[[listeners]]
addr = "[::]:8443"

[listeners.tls]
key = "./certs/localhost.ecdsa.key"
cert = "./certs/localhost.ecdsa.crt"

[db]
password = "password"

Running

Once all the setup work has been done to run the server just do

cargo run -- ./server.config.toml -V info

This will rebuild the server if any changes have been made in debug mode and then run the program with the config file ./server.config.toml and specify a logging output of info which will output any Error, Warn, and Info logs the server has.

The server will check for the existance of the admin user and create the necessary permissions and roles for the admin user if not found. The default password for the admin user will be password.