CloudBoard

Description

A simple web app that synchronizes users clipboards across multiple devices. Users can seamlessly copy on one device and paste on another. Here's a demo of the application: https://youtu.be/8-8Q-dVBZpw

Motivation

My main motivation to pursue this project was to learn Go, implement my own authentication system, and also familiarize myself with the Google Cloud Platform API's. I started the development using Cloud SQL API, Cloud App Engine, and Cloud Memorystore for Redis. I later switched to Elephant SQL, and Redis Labs due to credit limitations on GCP. The final application was also deployed on Cloud Run.

• I made my own JWT authentication system which enables users to signup, login, logout, and refresh their access tokens. Logging in creates a pair of refresh and access tokens which are sent using Set-Cookie headers. Refresh generates a new access token for the user and Logout deletes the tokens from the redis database.
• The SQL database was used to store user information and the redis database was used to store the tokens.
• Websockets were used to send clipboard data between the client and server. The server broadcasts the clipboard data to the client devices logged in with the same user. Redis pub/sub was used to achieve this.

I initially started coding the client side application in C++ but later switched to Go because of its available cross-platform library for clipboard access and ease of use.

Installation

1. Create a database on Elephant SQL and a redis database on Redis Labs
2. Create a .env file (Check sample.env for reference)
3. To run locally pull docker image and run the container

   docker pull ashutosh67/cloudboard-app
   

   docker run -p 8080:8080 --env-file=.env ashutosh67/cloudboard-app
   

4. To run on a server create a Google Cloud Platform project and enable Secret Manager API and Cloud Run API.
5. Run deploy-secrets.bash to deploy secrets to Secret Manager
6. Run deploy-run.bash to deploy the application to Cloud Run
7. Compile the client application and run it on your device (remember to change the server address in the client code)

   cd client && go build -o client
   

   ./client
   

Resources

• https://codevoweb.com/how-to-properly-use-jwt-for-authentication-in-golang/
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ma7rUS_vW9M
• https://cloud.google.com/sql/docs/mysql/connect-instance-app-engine
• https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/golang-samples/blob/main/cloudsql/mysql/database-sql/connect_tcp.go