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 templ, with SQLite as the primary datastore and sqlc for typed query generation. 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 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 and session handling logic
`api/playback`	Watch page, stream/subtitle proxying, and watch progress APIs
`api/watchlist`	Watchlist updates, retrieval, 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 policy 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 restricted. Only /login and static asset routes (/static/*, /dist/*) are available without authentication; all other routes require a valid session. There is no public registration; users must be seeded directly in the database.

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 depends on external providers, and there is no formal CI pipeline yet, so local validation is the primary 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.

bun install # Install Bun dependencies
go install github.com/a-h/templ/cmd/templ@latest # Install templ CLI
templ generate # Generate Go templates from .templ files
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 a single source stylesheet (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.

Note: The app requires at least one user in the database. Seed a user in the user table before attempting to login.

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

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. 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%