Gabriella439/simple-twitter

---

Gabriella439/simple-twitter.json

{
  "createdAt": "2019-10-12T20:56:39Z",
  "defaultBranch": "main",
  "description": "A bare-bones Twitter clone implemented in a single file",
  "fullName": "Gabriella439/simple-twitter",
  "homepage": null,
  "language": "Nix",
  "name": "simple-twitter",
  "pushedAt": "2025-04-09T22:33:34Z",
  "stargazersCount": 730,
  "topics": [],
  "updatedAt": "2025-10-29T08:40:02Z",
  "url": "https://github.com/Gabriella439/simple-twitter"
}

simple-twitter

This is a project which has corresponding talk slides

This is a bare bones “Twitter clone” implemented in [a single file]!(./simple-twitter.nix) that you can deploy to EC2

This uses:

• HTML + CSS for the front-end (No JavaScript)
• Bootstrap for some minimal styling
• A Haskell service for server-side rendering
• A Postgres database for application state
• NixOps for deployment
• AWS EC2 for hosting

The result looks like this:

Instructions

1. Create an AWS account

   … by following these instructions

2. Install Nix:

   $ curl https://nixos.org/nix/install | sh

3. Install the AWS command-line interface:

   $ nix-env --install awscli

4. Configure your AWS credentials

   … by following these instructions

   If you did this correctly you should have an ~/.aws/credentials file that looks similar to this:

   [default]
   aws_access_key_id = …
   aws_secret_access_key = …

5. Install NixOps:

   $ nix-env --install nixops

6. Build and redeploy the web application

   $ nixops create --deployment simple-twitter simple-twitter.nix
   $ nixops deploy --deployment simple-twitter --allow-reboot

If you make changes you can redeploy the application by re-running the last step:

$ nixops deploy --deployment simple-twitter --allow-reboot

To destroy the machine and clean up everything, run:

$ nixops destroy --deployment simple-twitter
$ nixops delete --deployment simple-twitter

Have fun! 🙂

Split files

You can also view the files split out by language:

• [./split.nix]!(./split.nix) - Only the Nix code
• [./Main.hs]!(./Main.hs) - Only the Haskell code
• [./initialScript.sql]!(./initialScript.sql) - Only the SQL code