Nexlibris, the next Ex Libris

I’m starting to rebuild Ex Libris. The original version works fine still, but I’m not enthusiastic about maintaining it. But I’m proud of it and still want it to shine! So I’m setting it up with techniques and technologies that I’m more actively engaged with or excited about.

For context, the original version is built in Ruby on Rails and hosted on Heroku. Whilst Rails is still a fine platform, I haven’t used it professionally or personally in any major way for almost two years now. And the only reason I was still using Heroku was because I was still using Rails.

So, the new plan… I’m switching to Next.js. I’ve become a big fan since it started supporting so much server-side rendering. I can build something in React that doesn’t need to run a single line of javascript in your browser. It has so much else to offer to make the frontend design and development experience straightforward and elegant. I’m not a confident designer, so anything that helps me experiment and test at a more rapid pace is worth investing in.

But I want to manage the data somewhere else. Encore has been my obsession for a while now. When I’m dealing with complicated database queries, reverse engineering weird asset management techniques, or managing a slow migration of a large community content database, I want to use something I trust. Especially when that system substantially reduces the noise and complexity I would usually have to deal with if I wanted to manage something like this in Go.

The plan is to build out a backend system that initially pulls content from the same database as the original Rails application. When the public facing parts are feature complete and fully styled, I’ll serve all public content from the new Next.js app and send admin users to the Rails app.

From there, I can replace the admin section too. Initially, this will still modify content on the original database. At this point, I could start layering new functionality on to the application - some community-focused features like creating lists of your favourite content for example.

But when admins are fully capable on the new system, I can shut down the Rails app. From there, I am free to change things more freely. Possibly even opening up access to external services (people have previously raised the question of API access to the database).

This plan has been floating around in my head for a while and a few problems were holding me back. I couldn’t start this process whilst the database was hosted on Heroku as they do not provide a consistent and reliable method for connecting to one of their hosted databases. Rails also left me a bit stumped about how to handle all of the cover images for the entries that had been uploaded to an AWS S3 bucket over the years. And subdomains on Next.js are not a natural fit.

In the last week I’ve been taking these challenges on. I moved the database over to Neon so the Rails app can still manage everything but I can now open connections from outside of Heroku. I started building out the new system and deployed it to https://www.nexlibrisrpg.com. It handles subdomains and it can fetch presigned URLs for those entry cover images. That’s enough for me to be confident that I can make this work.

So consider this a public announcement that I’m getting started on this properly!