Ohlife Replacement Server

An replacement or alternative to Ohlife The fronted is here

Overview

After Ohlife ,the Chinese alternative juzishiguang also shutdown. After lots of searching, I found that those open source replacements are either limited in function or hard to deploy. So I came up with the idea using Flask to write an easy-to-deploy Ohlife replacement.

What is it?

In a word, it's a email-based diary system.

The long version:

This program sends you an email everyday (or any time period you set) with greetings. All you have to do is reply this email and the reply content will be saved on the server. Pretty much the same as the original Ohlife.

Quickstart

Warning: The methods below can't be used right now.

Clone the repository and fill the config.yaml file according to comments and hit deploy.sh script.

Boom!

And enjoy using it.

How to deploy

Basically , you just need a Linux server with Python3 installed. Python2 is not supported.

The author have provided one-click install script in the project.But this script is not tested on many servers, if you want to deploy it manually or you encounter some wired problems. Please follow the steps below(The Steps are only tested on Ubuntu 14):

1. Install Postfix
   Use sudo apt-get install postfix to install postfix as the local SMTP server. During installation, you have to set your host name and server type. As for this project , you can choose 'Internet Server'. However,if you have some kind of SMTP service like SendGrid, you can pass this step.

2. Clone the project
   Use git clone https://github.com/paulx3/ohlife_relacement_server.git to clone the repository to your local server.

3. Install Python 3 and its dependencies
   Install Python3 using sudo apt-get install -y python3-pip. Enter the project folder cd ohlife_relacement_server and install all python dependencies pip3 install -r requirements.txt

4. Register SendGrid
   This project uses SendGrid or services alike to transform email into post request. So you should register one first. And by default, it uses SendGrid's SMTP API to send emails.
   After you log in your SendGrid account, you can follow this guide to get your SMTP credential and set in config.cfg file. And you can follow this tutorial to set inbound email parse.
   The inbound email parse should send POST request to http://your.domain.name:port/save. Say if you deploy the program on test.com:8090, then the target will be http://test.com:8090/save.

5. Add Credential
   You need to add several credentials before you deploy the server:

• Cloudmailin address
• Default admin username and password
• (optional) Amazon S3 credential
  
  There is a template file called config.cfg in server folder. The content is pretty much obvious. You can just fill in your config and credentials.

Localization

This project has already provided two locale options. All you need to change is locale:en-US in config.cfg file. For example, if you want the Chinese version , you can change locale:en-US in config.cfg to locale:zh_Hans_CN.

The project uses Python-Babel to achieve localization.The author tries to tag all the text using Babel gettext()

I know the locale function for this app can be over-engineering.

So if you have a better option. You can open an issue or pull request. So if you are interested in localizing the project, please folow instruction below:

1. Enter locale folder under server folder and copy the folder en-US and give it a new name.
2. Using tools like Poedit to edit ohlife.po file and translate. The tool will automatically compile po file into mo binary file.
3. Edit locale in config.cfg to the name of your new folder. For example, if you add a new folder called spanish. Then you have to use locale:spanish.

For detailed example of how to use Babel to do the localization , you can check this repository.

Current developing status

• Change to use Yaml as config
• Limit key API(Email Sending) access
• Json Export and import function
• Logging system
• Supporting email with photo attachment
• Third party SMTP service login support
• At least 80% code coverage
• Email sending function
• Deploy instruction
• Deploy script
• Front and end support for mobile app
• Mobile app
• Chinese Readme
• Localization
• Amazon S3 backup service
• A timer for backup and email sending task