Static Assistant

Intro

This tool is a small backend meant to provide different useful features for static websites. e.g.: form endpoint, newsletter registration endpoint, etc.

Features

Email form forwarding

Use this assistant to forward forms on a static website to an email address. The configurable spam blacklist keeps your inbox clean.

Newsletter registration

Work in progress. Should be released soon.

How to use it?

The setup process is in two steps:

1. Deploy this to your favourite server. (see Deploy)
2. Point your form to yourserveraddress/contact And voilà

Deploy

Two different options:

1. Deploy to a VPS
2. Deploy to a PaaS

VPS

Follow the process described under Contribution on a VPS, then configure NGINX See Digital Ocean's doc

PaaS

A Digital Ocean config fill will be added to the project soon.

Config

The assistant is highly configurable. The goal is to be able to deploy one instance and use it for multiple sites.

All the configuration lies in a JSON config file at config/config.json

Here's an example:

{
  "allowed_sources": ["testserver", "localhost"], // requests not coming from one of these hosts will be rejected
  "email": {
    "allow_default_to": true, // if true, requests fron an host not configured in "to" will be forwarded to the default email. If false, they will be rejected 
    "from": "jean@petit.be", // sender email address. Must be the one configured in your Postman account
    "to": {
      "default": "jean@petit.be", // default forward to email
      "myapp": "me@myapp.com" // "host" : "fowrward to email". This is useful to use one deployment of this tool for multiple static websites with different form recipients
    }
  },
  "spam": {
    "emails": ["spammer@email.be"], // emails spamlist. Requests with one of these as reply_to address will be rejected
    "content": ["please check this obscure website"] // requests with these sequences in the body will be rejected
  }
}

Contribution

Contributions are welcome in the form of PR's. Please open an issue first, so we can discuss the change beforehand.
Here's how to setup your local environment:

Prerequisites

• Python 3.9
• A Postmark account and API token.

Setup local environment

1. Clone this repos

git clone git@github.com:svandegar/static-assistant.git && cd static-assistant

2. Create a virtual environment at the project root

virtualenv venv

3. Activate the virtual environment

source venv/bin/activate

4. Install the Python dependencies

pip install -r requirements

5. Duplicate config/.env.example and rename it to .env

cp config/.env.example config/.env

6. Add your Postmark token in .env
7. Add your own config to config/contig.json (see Config section)
8. Run the tests

pytest