A self-contained forum application built with Spring Boot. Users can register, create posts, leave comments, and vote — all secured with Spring Security and persisted via an embedded H2 database.
- User registration and authentication (Spring Security, BCrypt)
- Create, browse, and read forum posts
- Nested commenting on posts
- Upvote / downvote posts
- Schema migrations managed by Flyway
- Deployable as a standalone JAR or via Docker
| Login | Feed |
|---|---|
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| New Post | Post & Comments |
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| Layer | Technology |
|---|---|
| Backend | Java 17, Spring Boot 3, Spring MVC |
| Security | Spring Security 6 |
| Persistence | Spring Data JPA, H2 (file mode) |
| Migrations | Flyway |
| Templating | Thymeleaf + Thymeleaf Security extras |
| Build | Maven |
| Container | Docker (multi-stage build) |
| Observability | Spring Boot Actuator |
Prerequisites: Java 17+
docker compose -f docker/docker-compose.yml up -d./mvnw clean package -DskipTests
java -jar target/forumly-app.jarOpen http://localhost:8080 in your browser.
A data/ directory is created on first run to hold the H2 database files.
src/main/java/com/dominikmiskovic/forumly/
├── config/ # Security and migration configuration
├── controller/ # MVC controllers (Home, Post, Comment, Vote, Auth)
├── dto/ # Request and response DTOs
├── model/ # JPA entities (User, Post, Comment, Vote)
├── repository/ # Spring Data repositories
├── service/ # Business logic
└── exception/ # Custom exceptions
The app follows a standard layered MVC architecture. Spring Security handles authentication and route protection. Flyway runs versioned SQL migrations on startup. The H2 database runs in file mode so data survives restarts.
Browser → Thymeleaf templates ← Controllers → Services → Repositories → H2 (file)
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Spring Security