An open community of tech mentors — mentees find a mentor, send a request, and meet one-on-one. The platform connects people and stays out of the way: no payment processing, no lock-in, sessions are arranged directly between mentor and mentee.
OpenMentor is a community project: donation-funded, zero commission, no ads — and mentoring for free is encouraged. The full story is at openmentor.io/about.
This is the monorepo for the whole platform.
| Directory | What it is | Stack |
|---|---|---|
web/ |
The website: mentor catalog, profiles, contact flow, mentor dashboard, admin moderation | Next.js 16, TypeScript, Tailwind |
api/ |
Backend: REST API, background worker (email + cron jobs), DB migrations — three binaries, one Docker image | Go, PostgreSQL |
infra/ |
Deployment: Docker Compose + Traefik on a single VM, Postgres with backups, Grafana Alloy observability | Compose, shell |
docs/ |
Decisions log, runbooks, legal drafts, design reference, historical migration plan | Markdown |
brand/ |
"Fresh Signal" brand asset pack — logos, color tokens (source of truth for web/public/brand) |
SVG/PNG/CSS |
Each component keeps its own README with details; start there.
The web app is a thin client — every data operation goes through the Go API (mentors catalog, magic-link auth for mentors and moderators, request lifecycle). Side effects (transactional email via AWS SES, daily reminder/deactivation crons) run in a separate worker process built from the same Go codebase — isolated crash domain, own DB pool, talked to via authenticated internal HTTP triggers. Everything deploys as one Compose stack behind Traefik on a single VM, with Postgres in a container (protected external volume + nightly dumps to S3), and metrics/logs/traces/profiles shipped to Grafana Cloud through Alloy.
# 1. Database
docker run -d --name openmentor-pg \
-e POSTGRES_USER=openmentor -e POSTGRES_PASSWORD=password -e POSTGRES_DB=openmentor \
-p 5432:5432 postgres:16-alpine
# 2. API (see api/.env.example for required vars)
cd api && cp .env.example .env # fill in dev values
go run ./cmd/migrate && go run ./cmd/api # and optionally: go run ./cmd/worker
# 3. Web (see web/.env.example; GO_API_INTERNAL_TOKEN must match the API's INTERNAL_MENTORS_API)
cd web && cp .env.example .env && npm ci && npm run devFull-stack via Compose: see infra/README.md.
| Workflow | Trigger | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
Checks |
every PR | The one required branch-protection check (Checks / required-checks) — runs quick gates for whatever changed, passes trivially otherwise |
CI / Web |
changes under web/ |
lint, typecheck, tests, production build |
CI / API |
changes under api/ |
race tests + coverage floor, gosec → SARIF in the Security tab plus a gate on HIGH findings outside api/gosec-baseline.txt, full Docker smoke test (postgres → migrate → api → worker) |
Deploy |
manual dispatch | builds both images from one SHA, ships the stack to the VM with health-checked rollback; serialized (production-deploy concurrency group + a VM-side flock) |
Every uses: is pinned to a commit SHA (Dependabot's github-actions ecosystem
refreshes them), and the merge gate keeps every fast check exclusively — see the
header of .github/workflows/checks.yml.
Contributions are welcome — and mentoring counts as one. See CONTRIBUTING.md for the ways to help, how to get set up, the house rules, and what to run before opening a PR. Small fixes can go straight to a pull request; anything larger should start as an issue.
- Code of conduct
- Security policy — please report vulnerabilities privately, never as an issue
openmentor.io began as a fork of getmentor.dev — a Russian-language mentorship community by the same author — adapted for a global audience: translated, redesigned, Telegram-free, and consolidated from five repositories into this monorepo (fresh history; the component repos remain as archives). The full story lives in docs/migration/.
AGPL-3.0 for the entire repository.