Carbon: Hackable white label CRM

Rational

Over the years, we have built multiple applications. We noticed at least 3 kinds of applications. One of them is a CRM. We've built a couple of applications that are CRM-like at the core. Of course since this is based on consultancy work, the apps are very much tied to needs of the client.

We are tired of building more or less the same app over and over again. So we are building Carbon. We want to use it to kickstart projects that need these kind of features.

We want to build a solid base that can be enriched for each new client and where everyone can benefit from the progress of all.

For this project we have particular goals:

• Sane and simple default data model. The default should not create thousands of tables and thousands of views. Only the basics and then DIY. We'll provide guidline on how to add new fields to enrich your model.
• Hackable We want to be able to change the stuff that matters without behing experts.
• Reasonably scalable We don't aim at building a facebook sized CRM. Still we don't want to find out that we can only handle 50 concurrent users.
• Customizable at runtime we want to allow the user the add new fields if they need to.

What we want to solve

We want to be able to keep tracks of relations in the long term with the clients. We want to follow what happens with each deal individually. We want to be able to share an address book through the app. The app should help us mere mortals to remember important events in our relationships with our clients and send us notifications if required.

What we don't want to solve

We don't want to add find-grained, business-specific, details.

Who is the target audience for this project

Running

To start your Carbon:

• Install Elixir with brew install elixir
• Install Node with curl -o- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/creationix/nvm/v0.31.4/install.sh | bash
• Install node dependency npm install
• Install dependencies with mix deps.get
• Create and migrate your database with mix ecto.setup
• Start Phoenix endpoint with mix phoenix.server

Now you can visit localhost:4000 from your browser.

Run the tests

mix test

Run all db migration in the prod env

rel/my_app/bin/my_app command Elixir.Release.Tasks migrate

Build a Release

MIX_ENV=prod mix release --env=prod

start the released server

_build/prod/rel/carbon/bin/carbon start