# HN Tail

HN Tail is a web application to [tail](https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/tail.1.html) comments for
[HackerNews](https://news.ycombinator.com/).

HN Tail helps you to track the latest comments on any given HN thread without having to visually parse the threads to
find the latest replies by creating a "feed" where new comments will be appended as they happen.

It is an attempt to solve [this problem](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4047719)

And also, it is a side project I build [just for fun, trying out new things, and learning
purposes](https://msurdi.github.io/posts/2-learning-and-sideprojects/).

HNTail is free, open source, and available at [hntail.github.io](https://hntail.github.io)

## Using it

When browsing any thread of comments in HN, such as
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19212822](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19212822), change the domain in the
URL in your browser from `news.ycombinator.com` to `hntail.github.io` so that it looks like
[https://hntail.github.io/item?id=19212822](https://hntail.github.io/item?id=19212822), or to `localhost:3000` or your
own domain if instead you are running it on your own.

## Running HN Tail locally

At some point, the package will be published in the [NPM registry](https://www.npmjs.com/), until then:

1. Ensure you have a recent version of Node and NPM
2. Clone this repository and run `npm install --only=production`
3. Run `npm run build`
4. Run `NODE_ENV=production npm start`. The application should be available at
   [http://localhost:3000](http://localhost:3000)

## Development environment

1. Clone the project
2. Run `npm install` to install all the dependencies
3. Run `npm run dev`.