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, watchlist management, continue-watching, and in-app playback in one server-rendered interface.

The interface is minimal and functional, featuring a dark theme and quick access to tracking tools.

Technical approach

The application is written in Go and rendered on the server with html/template, with SQLite as the primary datastore and sqlc for typed query generation. Styling uses Tailwind CSS v4. HTMX and small TypeScript 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. Playback proxying uses uTLS to bypass Cloudflare protections.

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 a background worker, and relation synchronization is incremental so one bad fetch does not block the rest of the graph.

Repository structure

The codebase follows standard Go project layout conventions.

Path	Purpose
`api/*`	Feature routes: anime, auth, playback, watchlist
`cmd/server`	Application entrypoint and CLI commands
`integrations/*`	External API clients and scraping
`internal/*`	Core services: db, middleware, server, worker
`pkg/middleware`	Generic HTTP middleware
`templates/*`	Server-rendered HTML templates
`migrations`	Schema evolution
`static` / `dist`	Frontend assets

Getting started

For local development, install Go 1.25+ and Bun, then build frontend assets and run the server.

bun install                                    # Install Bun dependencies
bun run build:css && bun run build:ts          # Build frontend assets (CSS and TypeScript)
PLAYBACK_PROXY_SECRET="your-32+char-secret" go run ./cmd/server  # Run the Go server

The frontend pipeline uses Tailwind CSS v4 (static/style.css) and TypeScript sources in static/*.ts, then emits build artifacts into dist/ for serving.

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

Creating a user

The app has no public registration. Use the built-in CLI command to create a user:

go run ./cmd/server create-user <username> <password>
# or with a built binary:
./server create-user <username> <password>

If the username already exists, you will be prompted to confirm overwriting the password.

Justfile

Common tasks are automated via the justfile. Run just <task> after installing just:

Task	Description
`just fmt`	Format Go code
`just lint`	Run go fmt and go vet
`just test`	Run Go tests
`just build`	Full build (Go binary, CSS, TS)
`just check`	Run all checks (lint, test, typecheck, build)
`just dev`	Build and start the server
`just install-hooks`	Install lefthook pre-push hooks

For containerized usage:

docker build -t myanimelist .
docker run --rm -p 3000:3000 -e PLAYBACK_PROXY_SECRET="your-32+char-secret" 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

After the container is running, exec into it to create a user:

docker exec <container> /server create-user <username> <password>

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 automatically. Schema history includes auth, watchlist, anime metadata, relation tracking, Jikan cache persistence, and retry-queue support.

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).

Alternatively, run tests manually with:

go test ./...

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.

Languages

Go 65%

TypeScript 32.3%

CSS 1.6%

Dockerfile 0.6%

Just 0.3%

Other 0.2%