Alias

A party game about fake names and wrong guesses. Live at alias.party.

Stack

• Frontend: React SPA built with Vite+ (src/)
• Backend: Convex for game state, Better Auth (Google) running inside Convex (convex/)
• Server: a small Go binary (server/) that embeds the built SPA and reverse-proxies /api/auth/* to the Convex site URL, so auth cookies stay first-party

Development

Requires Bun, Node 22+, and Go 1.25+.

bun install
bun run dev   # Vite on :3000 + convex dev

.env.local:

CONVEX_DEPLOYMENT=...
VITE_CONVEX_URL=https://<deployment>.convex.cloud
CONVEX_SITE_URL=https://<deployment>.convex.site   # used by the Vite dev proxy and the Go server
VITE_VISITORS_TOKEN=...

In dev, Vite proxies /api/auth to CONVEX_SITE_URL, same as the Go server does in production.

Other scripts: bun run check (format + lint + type-check), bun run format, bun run build.

Production

bun run build                 # builds the SPA into server/dist
cd server && go build -o alias .
CONVEX_SITE_URL=https://<deployment>.convex.site ./alias

Or with Docker:

docker build \
  --build-arg VITE_CONVEX_URL=https://<deployment>.convex.cloud \
  --build-arg VITE_VISITORS_TOKEN=... \
  -t alias .
docker run -p 8080:8080 -e CONVEX_SITE_URL=https://<deployment>.convex.site alias

Server env: CONVEX_SITE_URL (required), SITE_URL (public origin used in game-link previews, default https://alias.party), PORT (default 8080), LOG_LEVEL (default info).

SEO

• Page copy (tagline, description, how-to-play, FAQ) lives in src/content.ts. The Vite build turns it into the meta description, JSON-LD structured data, and crawler-readable HTML in index.html.
• The Go server swaps the <!-- seo:start --> block for per-game metadata on /game/{code}, so shared links preview as "Join my Alias game · CODE" (and aren't indexed).
• public/og.png and the PNG icons are rendered from scripts/og/og.html: npx playwright install chromium && node scripts/og/render.mjs.

The Convex deployment needs SITE_URL set to the public origin (e.g. https://alias.party), plus GOOGLE_CLIENT_ID / GOOGLE_CLIENT_SECRET.