Statster

Statster is a personal music listening tracker and community site – "reconcile with music." It keeps a long-running diary of what's been listened to, browsable by artist, album, format, release year, genre, tag and nationality, alongside user profiles, likes, comments ("shouts"), a private inbox, and a blog.

Tech stack

• PHP, built on CodeIgniter 3
• MySQL/MariaDB
• Vanilla JS, no frontend framework
• CSS with native nesting, bundled and minified for production via lightningcss (npm run build-css)

Development

Local development assumes a standard Apache + PHP + MySQL setup serving this directory (e.g. statster.local), with a local statster database. There's no build step for day-to-day PHP/view work – only CSS changes need npm run build-css run and committed before deploying, since production serves one bundled media/css/dist/bundle.min.css rather than the individual site_template files.

See package.json for the available scripts (CSS bundling, DB dump/ restore helpers, deploy).

CSS/JS asset URLs are cache-busted with a ?v=<filemtime> query string via the versioned_asset() helper (application/helpers/general_helper.php), used on every <link>/<script> tag in the site templates – this avoids stale cached assets on repeat visits after a deploy, since .htaccess sets a 1-week Cache-Control on CSS/JS.

Deployment

The app deploys with a plain git pull on the production server:

npm run push       # pushes to the configured git remotes
npm run sync-prod   # pulls on the production server over SSH

Avatar/album-art images are served from a separate host (img.statster.info) that has no git repo of its own – see media/img/image_server/README.md for that server's own deploy process.

Built on CodeIgniter

Statster runs on CodeIgniter 3, via the pocketarc/codeigniter maintenance fork that keeps CI3 working on current PHP versions now that the original 3.x branch is no longer maintained. There's no intention to migrate to CI4 or any other framework – CI3 does what this project needs.