Panoptikum

Panoptikum (or short Pan) is a webapplication written in Phoenix that represents a podcast discovery and community website.

It is licensed under the AGPL license. The project website with more information on the project can be found at https://www.panoptikum.social If you are interested and want to get in touch, write an email to Stefan.

Setup

📋 Prerequirements

• Make sure you have Elixir installed.
• Make sure you have Node.js installed.
• Make sure you have PostgreSQL installed and running.
• Make sure you have ManticoreSearch installed and running.

📦 Install dependencies

• Install Elixir's dependencies with mix deps.get
• Install Node.js dependencies with npm install inside the assets folder

🛠 Configuration

• Dev works out of the box with no configuration — config/runtime.exs falls back to sensible local defaults (Postgres postgres/postgres, database pan_dev) if you don't set any env vars. Only set PAN_DB_USERNAME / PAN_DB_PASSWORD / PAN_DB_DATABASE / PAN_DB_HOSTNAME if your local Postgres needs different credentials.

📚 Database and demo data

• Setup your database with mix ecto.setup
• Import demo data
  • Uncompress materials/pan_dev.sql.gz
  • Import data with psql pan_dev < pan_dev.sql inside the materials folder
  • The dump already includes an admin user, username admin and password changeme — no seeding step needed (priv/repo/seeds.exs is currently just an empty template)

⏯ Run locally

• Start Phoenix endpoint with mix phx.server
• Now you can visit localhost:4000 from your browser.
• Login as Admin using username admin and password changeme

🌡 Testing

• Run tests with mix test

🐳 QA environment

To stand up a disposable QA deployment on a separate server via Docker Compose, see DOCKER.md.

✨ Bonus

• Sending a Test Mail from the console Pan.Email.login_link_html_email("mytoken", "my-email@example.com") |> Pan.Mailer.deliver()
• To rebuild the search index login as admin and visit localhost:4000/admin/search/reset_all
• To attach to a server session: /var/phoenix/pan/bin/pan remote and then, for example PanWeb.Podcast.get_deprecated(10) to probe deprecated podcasts and get delete/unretire recommendations

🙏 Sitting on the shoulders of giants

Panoptikum is only possible because of an enormous amount of open-source work by others. Thank you.

Server stack

• Elixir & Erlang/OTP
• Phoenix — web framework
• Ecto & Postgrex — database layer
• PostgreSQL — database
• Phoenix LiveView
• Bandit — web server
• Manticore Search — full text search
• Quinn — XML parsing for feed import
• HTTPoison — HTTP client
• Timex & tzdata — date and time handling
• HtmlSanitizeEx — sanitizing feed HTML
• Floki — HTML parsing
• MDEx — Markdown rendering
• Swoosh & gen_smtp — mailing
• bcrypt_elixir — password hashing
• ja_serializer — JSON:API serialization
• Mogrify & ImageMagick — image processing
• eqrcode — QR code generation
• Gettext — i18n
• Telemetry & ecto_psql_extras — observability
• Tailwind CSS & DaisyUI — styling
• Alpine.js — frontend interactivity
• topbar — page-load progress bar
• Podlove Web Player — podcast episode player

Development stack

• Linux Mint — development OS
• Visual Studio Code — editor
• Docker & Docker Compose — QA environment, see DOCKER.md
• Node.js & npm — frontend asset tooling
• esbuild — JS bundling
• Credo — static code analysis
• Igniter — codegen/patching framework
• Claude Code & Tidewave — AI-assisted development
• usage_rules — gathering dependency usage guidance for AI coding tools