Developer Getting Started

Set up your local workstation to develop on the MTVL backend and frontend.

Prerequisites

Go: 1.24+ (Go 1.26 recommended)
Node.js: v20.0.0+
npm: v10+
PostgreSQL or a Neon Database account (or local Docker container)

1. Setting Up the Backend (`mtvl`)

# Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/mylists/mtvl.git
cd mtvl

# Download Go module dependencies
go mod download

# Run test suite to verify setup
go test -v ./...

Environment Configuration

The backend supports the following environment variables:

Variable	Default	Description
`SERVER_PORT`	`8080`	Port for the HTTP server
`DB_DRIVER`	`postgres`	Database driver (`postgres`, `mysql`, `sqlite3`)
`DB_DSN`	`postgres://...`	Database connection string
`JWT_SECRET`	`secret`	Secret key used to sign JWT tokens
`AUTH_PROVIDER_TYPE`	`jwt`	Auth engine: `jwt` or `external`
`CORS_ALLOWED_ORIGINS`	`*`	Allowed CORS origins (e.g. `http://localhost:5173`)

Starting the Backend

# Using local Postgres or Neon DSN
DB_DRIVER=postgres DB_DSN="postgres://user:pass@localhost:5432/mtvl?sslmode=disable" go run main.go

The server automatically applies all pending Goose migrations upon startup.

2. Setting Up the Frontend (`mtvl-frontend`)

# In a separate terminal
git clone https://github.com/mylists/mtvl-frontend.git
cd mtvl-frontend

# Install dependencies
npm install

# Start Vite development server
npm run dev

Visit http://localhost:5173 in your browser. The frontend will proxy API requests to http://localhost:8080.