nimforum

NimForum is a light-weight forum implementation with many similarities to Discourse. It is implemented in the Nim programming language.

This fork uses BaraDB instead of SQLite. BaraDB is a custom database engine that communicates via a TCP wire protocol. The forum connects to a running BaraDB server instead of opening a local SQLite file.

Architecture

┌─────────────┐      HTTP       ┌─────────────┐      TCP       ┌─────────────┐
│   Browser   │ ◄─────────────► │  nimforum   │ ◄────────────► │   BaraDB    │
│             │                 │  (Jester)   │   (wire proto) │   Server    │
└─────────────┘                 └─────────────┘                └─────────────┘
                                       │
                                       ▼
                                ┌─────────────┐
                                │  public/    │
                                │ (JS, CSS)   │
                                └─────────────┘

Why BaraDB?

This project was created to test and validate BaraDB's SQL compatibility and wire protocol. Running a real-world application like NimForum against BaraDB surfaced many practical issues (reserved keywords, type conversions, async protocol safety) that unit tests alone would not catch.

Changes from upstream

Area	Upstream	This fork
Database	SQLite (file)	BaraDB (TCP server)
DB driver	db_connector/db_sqlite	baradb_sqlite.nim (drop-in adapter)
Keywords	status, key, like	Renamed to usrStatus, sessionKey, postLike
Date/time	DATETIME('now')	NOW()
FTS search	SQLite FTS4	Disabled (returns empty)
HTTP backend	httpbeast (multi-threaded)	asynchttpserver (single-threaded)*

* Switched to asynchttpserver via -d:useStdLib because httpbeast's worker threads share the global db ref, causing GC corruption and segfaults at startup.

Requirements

• Nim >= 2.0
• Nimble
• libsass / libsass-dev (for SCSS compilation)
• A running BaraDB server (see below)

Quick start

1. Start BaraDB

cd ../Baradb
BARADB_JWT_SECRET=test nimble build_debug
BARADB_JWT_SECRET=test ./build/baradadb

The server listens on 127.0.0.1:9472 by default.

2. Build and run the forum

cd nimforum

git submodule update --init --recursive

# Build CSS and frontend JS
nimble frontend

# Create development database (admin/admin)
nimble devdb

# Compile and run backend
nimble backend

The forum will be available at http://localhost:5000.

Build tasks

nimble backend      # Compile & run the forum backend
nimble runbackend   # Run the compiled backend
nimble frontend     # Build CSS + JS frontend assets
nimble devdb        # Create a dev database with seed data
nimble testdb       # Create a test database
nimble blankdb      # Create an empty database

Project layout

nimforum/
├── src/
│   ├── forum.nim           # Main Jester backend
│   ├── baradb_client.nim   # BaraDB wire-protocol client
│   ├── baradb_sqlite.nim   # Drop-in db_sqlite adapter
│   ├── setup_nimforum.nim  # DB initialization script
│   └── frontend/           # Karax SPA sources
├── public/
│   ├── js/forum.js         # Compiled frontend (generated)
│   ├── css/                # Compiled SASS + Spectre
│   └── images/
├── Baradb/                 # BaraDB source (sibling directory)
└── nimforum.nimble

Known issues / limitations

• FTS search disabled — BaraDB does not support SQLite FTS4 virtual tables. The search endpoint returns empty results.
• No COLLATE NOCASE — Some string comparisons may be case-sensitive where the original was not.
• Manual nextId() — Auto-increment is simulated with SELECT COALESCE(MAX(id),0)+1, which is not atomic under high concurrency.
• Single-threaded HTTP — Due to the global db ref holding async TCP state, the forum runs on a single async thread. For a busy site you would need per-request DB connections or a connection pool.

License

MIT — see upstream nimforum for original copyright.