MyAnimeList

MyAnimeList My personal anime tracker, built because nothing else felt right.

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Why this project exists

I built this for myself.

I was frustrated with the UI and UX of every tracker I tried. Even when something looked decent, it still felt awkward to use day-to-day, or it was missing pieces I considered essential. I wanted one place that matched how I actually watch anime: search fast, get context fast, update status fast, and move on.

So this project is personal first and public second. I put it on GitHub because I like shipping in the open, not because it was originally designed as a general-purpose product for everyone.

Technically, I also wanted to prove that a small, server-rendered Go app could stay reliable even when upstream anime APIs are inconsistent. A lot of this code exists because real APIs rate-limit, timeout, and occasionally fail at the worst possible moment.

What the application offers

For my own workflow, MyAnimeList combines catalog browsing, seasonal discovery, quick search, detail pages with recommendations and relations, full watchlist management, continue-watching, and in-app playback in one server-rendered interface.

Authentication in the web UI is login-only.

Technical approach

The application is written in Go and rendered on the server with templ, with SQLite as the primary datastore and sqlc for typed query generation. HTMX and small JavaScript modules handle incremental interactions, which keeps the interface responsive without moving the entire product into a heavy client-side architecture.

The external anime data source is Jikan (https://api.jikan.moe/v4). Because reliability is a first-class concern, the client layer includes request pacing, bounded retries, backoff behavior, stale-cache fallback, and a persisted retry queue for failed fetches that should be retried later.

Repository structure

The codebase follows standard Go project layout conventions with clear separation between public APIs, external integrations, private internals, and web presentation.

Public API Layer

Path	Purpose
api/anime	Catalog, discovery, search, details, recommendations, and relations
api/auth	Login/session handling and auth service logic
api/playback	Watch page, stream/subtitle proxying, and watch progress APIs
api/watchlist	Watchlist updates, retrieval, import/export, and continue-watching

External Integrations

Path	Purpose
integrations/jikan	Upstream API client, caching, and retry-aware fetch behavior
integrations/watchorder	Watch-order scraping and parsing helpers

Private Internal Code

Path	Purpose
cmd/server	Application entrypoint and process lifecycle setup
internal/db	Migration runner, generated query layer, and DB models
internal/middleware	App-specific auth and access control middleware
internal/server	Route registration and middleware composition
internal/worker	Background relation sync, retry processing, and cache cleanup

Reusable Libraries

Path	Purpose
pkg/middleware	Generic HTTP middleware (CSRF, rate limiting, logging)

Web Layer

Path	Purpose
web/templates	Server-rendered page and partial templates
web/components	Reusable UI components and icons

Assets & Operations

Path	Purpose
migrations	Schema evolution and operational DB changes
static	Source CSS, TypeScript, and static assets
dist	Built frontend assets served at /dist/*

cmd/ structure notes are documented in cmd/README.md.

Runtime behavior

On startup, the server opens SQLite using DATABASE_FILE (defaulting to mal.db), runs migrations automatically, initializes core services, starts the background worker, and then serves HTTP traffic on PORT (defaulting to 3000). A request enters the router, passes through global middleware for origin and auth boundaries, reaches a feature handler, and then resolves through service logic that combines database access with upstream data where needed before rendering HTML.

Public access is intentionally limited. Only /login and static asset routes (/static/*, /dist/*) are available without authentication; all other routes require a valid session.

The background worker continuously maintains relation data for sequel awareness, processes queued retryable anime fetches, and periodically removes expired cache records. This keeps user-facing pages stable even when data collection has to happen in multiple phases.

Reliability and tradeoffs

The hardest part has been balancing freshness and resilience. Upstream APIs can fail transiently with 429 and 5xx responses, so the app favors graceful degradation over hard failure. Cached values are used when fresh requests fail, retryable failures are persisted and replayed in the worker, and relation synchronization is incremental so one bad fetch does not block the rest of the graph.

There are still honest limits. Metadata quality still depends partly on external providers, and there is also no formal CI pipeline yet, so local validation is currently the main quality gate.

Getting started

For local development, install Go 1.24+, Bun, and the templ CLI, then generate templates, build frontend assets, and run the server.

go install github.com/a-h/templ/cmd/templ@latest
bun install
templ generate
./scripts/check.sh
PLAYBACK_PROXY_SECRET="your-32+char-secret" go run ./cmd/server

The frontend pipeline uses a single source stylesheet (static/style.css) and TypeScript sources in static/*.ts, then emits build artifacts into dist/ (dist/tailwind.css and dist/*.js) for serving.

When the server starts, the app is available at http://localhost:3000.

Important notes:

• Environment variables are read directly from the process environment (PORT, DATABASE_FILE, ENV, PLAYBACK_PROXY_SECRET); .env is not auto-loaded.
• The web app currently exposes a login route only. Seed at least one user directly in the SQLite database before first login.

For containerized usage, the included Dockerfile uses a multi-stage build that installs Bun + templ, builds assets, generates templates, compiles cmd/server, and ships a slim runtime image with SQLite support.

docker build -t myanimelist .
docker run --rm -p 3000:3000 myanimelist

For persistent data in containers, set DATABASE_FILE to /app/data/mal.db and mount a volume:

docker run --rm \
  -p 3000:3000 \
  -e DATABASE_FILE=/app/data/mal.db \
  -v "$(pwd)/data:/app/data" \
  myanimelist

Configuration

Variable	Default	Description
PORT	3000	HTTP listen port
DATABASE_FILE	mal.db	SQLite database file path
ENV	(empty)	Set to production to enable secure session cookies
MIGRATIONS_DIR	(auto-discovered)	Optional explicit path to migration files
PLAYBACK_PROXY_SECRET	(required)	HMAC secret for signed playback proxy tokens (min 32 chars)

Database and testing

Migrations run at startup, so schema changes are applied automatically before the server begins accepting traffic. Migration history includes the initial auth and watchlist schema, anime metadata expansion, relation tracking, Jikan cache persistence, indexing updates, and retry-queue support for failed fetches.

Current automated tests are unit-focused and cover watchlist behavior, relation helpers, auth middleware boundaries, and watch-order parsing. Run the full local validation suite with:

./scripts/check.sh

There is no CI workflow, so validation is local. Use just check to run all checks (lint, test, typecheck, build) or just install-hooks to set up the pre-push hook that runs them automatically before each push.

Note

just must be installed first (e.g. brew install just).

Security

Keep secrets out of version control, do not publish real credentials in documentation or screenshots, and report security issues privately before public disclosure.

License

This project is released under the MIT License. See LICENSE for details.