It’s been about two weeks since I last posted an update about Boilerbase so I figured it would be a good time to put an update on here, since a lot has changed since then.
tl;dr
- Accepted into buildspace s5
- Building out new functionality to programmatically generate custom boilerplates
More on the second point below:
My vision since changing from a marketplace to a SaaS has always been to generate the boilerplate for users programmatically, and I’m starting to make that functionality work now.
Previously, users would fill out a form about their tech stack and product needs, and then get matched to a pre-existing boilerplate. Now however, users fill out a similar form, but the boilerplate code will be generated automatically and uploaded a private repository on their personal GitHub account.
Right now, I have GitHub authentication set up, and I have a form that works to generate a long compound terminal command (leveraging a couple different open source tools) to generate a really good boilerplate based on tech stack and product spec needs (the user's answers to the questions on the form).
Now, I just need to figure out where/how I'm going to run this command to create the files and then upload these files to GitHub. Right now, I'm thinking I will need to set up some type of Linux server separate from the Vercel server that's hosting my app. This new Linux server would run the command and take care of pushing the code to GitHub. If that assumption is right, there are a few important questions that I would need to figure out:
- How do I securely pass along the GitHub token and secrets so that the server can upload the files, without exposing sensitive secrets via network requests?
- What type/provider of server is best to do this?
These are both questions that I will be trying my best to solve in the next couple of weeks as I work towards a more complete version of Boilerbase. That being said, I've shown a few founders who are beta testing the app this new functionality that creates the command line string to generate the boilerplate, and they were very very impressed to say the least, so I’m excited about where I can take this.
I've been learing a lot about GitHub's API, Vercel's server and file system structure, OAuth apps, GitHub's SDK (Octokit), and many more things that I didn't really anticipate getting to know so well when I first started Boilerbase as a simple marketplace web app with listings of boilerplates.
These new challenges are pretty fun though and I feel like I'm learning a lot. It's interesting because a lot of the problems I've been running into lately have not been easy to find solutions on Google, which is a good sign to me that I'm starting to work on more interesting problems.
For the next couple weeks, I'll be getting to know GitHub's API even better, and hopefully have a more ironed out solution for how I'm going to generate this code and upload it to a repository for the user.
The good news is once that's done, this app is totally ready to go for a bunch of people to use, so I'm excited and hoping to get this thing done before the school year starts, because not only will I be much busier, but there will be hackathons and a lot of good events where I can spread the word about Boilerbase and help a lot of people ship their apps much faster.
— Isaac