upvoters ☝️

upvoters is a basic anonymous voting system that can be added to a blog. I recently reworked my personal blog with the Hugo Bear blog theme. I came across the creator's (Herman Martinus) blogging site which had this really cool anonymous upvote system. I wanted something similar and decided to implement it myself. The goal is maximum simplicity.

Important Notes

This service does NOT have any authentication/authorization, so you should NOT serve this to the public web. I'm using this by just serving it on the same VPS as my blog.

Requirements

• Rust (stable)
• PostgreSQL 16

Configuration

The following environment variables are required:

Variable	Description
POSTGRES_CONNECTION_STRING	PostgreSQL connection string (e.g. postgres://user:password@localhost:5432/upvoters)

Running locally

With Docker Compose

Builds and starts both the database and app:

docker compose up --build

The server will be available at http://localhost:3000.

Without Docker

Start the database:

docker compose up -d db

Run the server:

POSTGRES_CONNECTION_STRING=postgres://uprs:password123@localhost:5432/uprs cargo run

The server listens on port 3000.

API

Method	Endpoint	Description
GET	/health	Health check
POST	/posts/{slug}/vote	Upvote a post
DELETE	/posts/{slug}/vote	Remove a vote from a post
GET	/posts/{slug}/votes	Get vote count and whether the current user has voted

Voter identity is tracked via a voter_id cookie. One is set automatically on first request.

GET /posts/{slug}/votes response

{
  "vote_count": 42,
  "voted": true
}

Running tests

Tests require a running PostgreSQL instance at postgres://uprs:password123@localhost:5432/uprs.

cargo test

License

MIT — see LICENSE.