Tally

Tally is a score keeper for the New York Times crossword. It uses Next.js and a Postgres backend to store users and scores. It uses email magic links for authentication.

Development

Copy .env.example to .env and fill in the connection information for your development Postgres instance, authentication secret, canonical URL, and email server information. If you use vercel to host Tally, in production the POSTGRES_ variables will be automatically filled when you connect to their hosted database service. Copy the NON_POOLING url to the DATABASE_URL variable for the DB migration scripts to use.

Use your node package manager of choice to install the project. I use bun and that is the only one I have tested.

Setting up DB

Install & run postgres locally. Populate the .env with the details of your local connection. Populate NODE_ENV with development, which db-migrate will use to know not to try to use ssl locally (see db-migrate.json). Example env:

POSTGRES_URL="postgres://user@localhost:5432/user"
POSTGRES_PRISMA_URL="postgres://user@localhost:5432/user"
POSTGRES_URL_NON_POOLING="postgres://user@localhost:5432/user"
POSTGRES_USER="user"
POSTGRES_HOST="localhost:5432"
POSTGRES_PASSWORD=""
POSTGRES_DATABASE="user"

# db-migrate automatically reads this
NODE_ENV="development"
DATABASE_URL="postgres://user@localhost:5432/user"

...

Now, to initialize the DB and start the dev environment:

bun install
bun db:up
bun dev

Commands

Command	Usage
dev	start the development server
build	build (intended for production)
dev:build	build locally
db:up	run all outstanding up migrations
db:down	roll back the latest migration
db-migrate create --sql-file	create a new migration

Todos

• Add a set-env script that copies values from .env.production to the deployed vercel project.