Meowery

Description

In Meowery, cats of the internet gather up to showcase their adorability within randomly selected GIFs worldwide! On top of the application's carefree design, settle down and let yourself free from the hassle of human society - just delve into the world of felines and partake in their meowery!

Read more on itch.io

Installation

Installation through itch.io can be restrained because of the app's lack of code-signing and notarization. Certain workarounds have been provided on the itch.io page.

Regardless, you can also run the application on your own machine through this numbered process involving the creation of two separate directories:

App Directory

1. Fork this GitHub repository, create a directory for the application's contents, and clone your forked repository there.
2. Install the necessary NPM dependencies, which are listed on package.json, by running npm install. A node_modules folder will appear inside the app directory.
3. Create an .env file on the root of the app directory, where you're soon going to provide a URL from your server that fetches GIFs from Tenor API.

Server Directory

4. Fork the meowery-server repository, create another directory for the server, which is going to extract GIFs and deliver them to the application, and clone your forked repository on this directory.
5. Run npm install to gather the necessary dependencies.
6. Create an .env file, and type in a Tenor API key as assigned to a key called TENOR_API_KEY (grab one here):

TENOR_API_KEY=your_tenor_api_key_goes_here

7. Run node index.js to host the server locally or connect it to a hosting service. If hosting locally, the server will be listened on localhost:3001
8. Copy this server URL, which sends GIF links as response.

Final Steps

9. Move to the app directory. In the .env file there, paste the server URL as assigned to a key called SERVER_URL

SERVER_URL=https://localhost:3001/

10. Run npm run start in the same directory - the app will execute.

11. (optional) Run npm run dist-all to package the application and create distributables into an out/ directory on the parent of your app directory.

Finally, this is the expected file structure:

app/
    assets/
    node_modules/
    scripts/
    styles/
    templates/
    .env (-> SERVER_URL here)
    .gitignore
    LICENSE
    main.js
    package-lock.json
    package.json

out/

server/
    node_modules/
    .env (-> TENOR_API_KEY here)
    .gitignore
    index.js
    LICENSE
    package-lock.json
    package.json

Resources

Promotional graphics for the application were created on Krita, and the GIFs are extracted off Tenor API.

On the backend, various NodeJS frameworks, including Electron, node-fetch, and dotenv, made this application feasible overall.

Moreover, Express, express-rate-limit, node-fetch, and Render were used to configure the server that delivers the GIFs to clients. See source code for the server setup.

Lastly, the application was packaged and made distributable through electron-builder.