MVC Library

An MVC app for managing a library.

why?

I built this project for a few reasons:

• I wanted to try my hand at building an MVC app from scratch
• I wanted to try more deeply understand MVC architecure. I've used MVC (Rails, Phoenix), but there's nothing like doing it all yourself
• I wanted to make a traditional web app (i.e. no JS frameworks)
• I wanted to try some old technologies and new technologies (see below)
• I wanted to use JSDocs instead of TypeScript (I do love TS though)
• I wanted to hand roll my own auth using session based auth

the old and the new

Old tech

• MVC architecture
• SQLite
• Server rendering everything, no client JS

New tech

• Drizzle for the ORM
• Hono for the server (instead of Express)
• JSDocs with type checking

Additionally, I wanted to implement some things I had learned but hadn't quite mastered, specifically database relationships like using a junction table

things I learned

A few things I learned along the way:

• using JSDoc alone can be frustrating at times, especially in something like the BaseModel where types need to be abstacted
• Drizzle has some cool tools, but the docs aren't quite there yet, or at least, not the most user friendly
• Since Drizzle is still in v0, it became essential to pin package versions
• For the junction table and using a foreign key, a service layer may have been necessary. I chose not to because it's all so simple

prereqs

Have sqlite3 installed locally.

install

1. Clone the repo, and run

npm i

Tip

If on Mac or Linux, you can run the build script ./rebuilddb.sh which will complete steps 2-4 automatically, except for adding it to the .env file.

2. Create a database

sqlite3 mvcapp.db ".databases .quit"

and use that database name in the .env file:

DB_PATH="./mvcapp.db"

Note

Ensure that your enviroment variables are available in your session by using a tool like direnv

3. Run the migrations

npm run migrate

4. Optionally, you can seed the database from the seeds.sql file by runnning

sqlite3 mvcapp.db < seeds.sql

Remember to change it to you database name if it is not mvcapp.db.

5. Start the app

Note

Ensure that you are using node 18 or 20. The latest version at this time (v22) seems to have some issues

npm run dev

And navigate to localhost:3000

use

The seeds.sql file generates one user:

Username	Password
admin	super123

And two roles — admin & user.

admin has priveleges to edit & delete all records, including users.

user can only edit their profile.