Banter Bus

Banter Bus is a multiplayer web-based party game inspired by JackBox games. Players join lobbies to play social deduction and guessing games together in real-time.

Table of Contents

• Getting Started
• Technology Stack

Demo

Getting Started

# Clone the repository
git clone https://gitlab.com/hmajid2301/banterbus
cd banterbus

# Allow direnv to load the development environment
direnv allow

# Start the development server
task dev

The application will be available at http://localhost:7331 (proxy for templ -> :8080).

Preview Environments

When creating merge requests, you can deploy preview environments:

1. Add the deploy/flux-preview label to your merge request
2. CI will automatically build and deploy a preview environment
3. Access your preview at https://mr-{MR_ID}.dev.banterbus.games
4. Environment is automatically cleaned up when MR is merged/closed

Technology Stack

Backend

• Go - Core application language
  • Standard library HTTP server
  • gobwas/ws for WebSocket communication
  • SQLC for type-safe database queries
• PostgreSQL - Primary database for game state and user data
• Redis - Pub/Sub messaging for real-time events between players
• templ - Type-safe HTML templating

Frontend

• HTMX - Dynamic HTML updates without JavaScript frameworks
• Alpine.js - Minimal JavaScript for interactive components
• Tailwind CSS - Utility-first styling

Development Experience

• Nix - Reproducible development environments
  • gomod2nix for Go dependency management
  • Automated development shells
  • Pre-commit hooks for code quality
  • Docker image builds
• Task - Simple task runner (alternative to Make)
• Air - Live reload during development
• SQLC - Generate type-safe Go code from SQL

Infrastructure & Deployment

• Terraform - Infrastructure as code
  • Single state file with workspace separation (dev/prod)
  • Automated DNS management via Cloudflare
  • Secret management through OpenBao
• Kubernetes - Container orchestration
  • GitOps deployment with Flux CD
  • Automatic scaling and health checks
• GitLab CI/CD - Continuous integration and deployment
  • Automated testing (unit, integration, e2e)
  • Docker image builds and registry management
  • Preview Environments - Automatic deployment for merge requests
    • Temporary environments for testing features
    • Automatic cleanup when MR is closed
    • URL format: https://mr-{ID}.dev.banterbus.games

Monitoring & Observability

• OpenTelemetry - Distributed tracing and metrics
• Grafana - Metrics visualization and alerting
• Prometheus - Metrics collection and storage
• Loki - Log aggregation
• Tempo - Distributed tracing backend