Postcards Application (WIP)

Installation

• Create a new .env file by copying the example one. cp .env.example .env
• Add a new app key through php artisan key:generate
• Add ClickSend credentials to .env file
• Set up a database and add credentials to the .env file`
• Run php artisan migrate --seed to migrate database tables and add admin users
• You can now already login through the /login page with the credentials from the UserTableSeeder.

Configuration

For every supporter's information, we are creating a job that calls ClickSend to order the postcards. Locally, you can set your QUEUE_CONNECTION= to sync. This way all jobs will just run one after the other. Live, we are making use of Horizon which uses Redis to handle the jobs. This way, every job is being handled separate when there is time for it.

You can use Horizon locally too, if you have Redis installed on your local server. Set QUEUE_CONNECTION= to redis and start the queue workers by calling php artisan horizon. You will see now on the console if there are new jobs and if they were processed. This can also be checked now on the UI of Horizon at /horizon. You need to be logged in to do that. If you change anything in the application's code, you need to restart Horizon. This is also why we terminate Horizon which every deploy $FORGE_PHP artisan horizon:terminate. On Forge, it will restart itself again after that command.

For more information, please check https://laravel.com/docs/master/horizon.

Campaigns

The postSendHook method on a campaign will be called after it was sent. It can be used to e.g. delete campaigns files after the campaign has been sent.

public function postSendHook(): void
{
    Storage::disk('campaigns')->deleteDirectory($this->getCampaignDirectoryName());
}

Create Postcard PDFs For The Front

We created an artisan command to generate those PDFs. If the image file will be stored locally, put it in the publich/images/ folder. Then you can generate the PDF like this:

php artisan postcards:generate-front-pdf postcards-front-climate-strike.png --campaign-name=my-campaign

This command will look for the image at .../public/images/postcards-front-climate-strike.png and if given, will create a postcard front PDF from it. The new pdf can now be found at .../public/pdfs/static/my-campaign.

If the image is stored online, use the URL instead of the image name like:

php artisan postcards:generate-front-pdf https://link-to.my/image --campaign-name=my-campaign

The new pdf can now be found at .../public/pdfs/static/my-campaign.