Placemark

The Placemark application.

Note: this is an early open source release of the codebase. I'm happy to help to some extent with setup, but I can't provide end-to-end integration assistance - it's a fairly complex web application and it works in the environment it was written in, but it will not work in every environment: it almost certainly won't work on Windows, for example.

I'm happy to accept PRs that make this easier to set up in different environments, to make features optional (to reduce the many environment variables required), or other broad improvements or fixes! I'm not sure about entirely removing features, given that I think it's useful to have this as an example of a fully-integrated real-world application, and things like error tracking are essential for that.

Opening an issue is the best way to get me – I'll get notifications for new issues.

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See docs/architecture.md for notes on the technologies under the hood.

Running with Docker

✨ There's now an example Docker file! See docs/docker for details.

Running in Render

The application is configured by the render.yaml file which is a Render blueprint. Hosting it on Render and using that is probably the fastest route to getting it on running, but it will work on similar hosting setups, like Railway, Heroku, or Flightcontrol. It might also work on Fly.io.

Note: it seems like Prisma, which Placemark uses as its ORM, has a bug when used within a Docker container on a Mac with an M chip. This bug is fixed in Prisma 5, so an upgrade to Prisma 5 would be great - in the meantime, this was originally developed without Docker and doesn't have the bug in macOS.

Installation

This project is built with yarn and last tested with version 1.22.19 of yarn. There's a lockfile for yarn. Installing with npm or another package manager will yield different, and potentially broken, dependencies.

I'm open to switching to npm if there is a PR submitted.

Environment variables

This application reads .env files when in development, and requires environment variables in production. It checks these environment variables when it starts up, so it will crash if one is missing. This is good: it's better for applications to crash now rather than later (see rule of repair).

You can see a list of the required environment variables at

• app/lib/env_server.ts
• app/lib/env_client.ts

Note that there's a lot of these. Placemark relies on:

Required

• GitHub
• Replicache

Optional

• Posthog
• Cloudflare
• Postmark
• WorkOS
• Stripe
• CampaignMonitor
• Logtail

Some of these could be made optional because self-hosted installations probably don't need Stripe. Doing this is very possible, and I'd gladly accept PRs doing so - but it's probably not something that I'll (tmcw) be able to do with my limited time.

Infrastructure

Placemark relies on two servers:

1. The application (this repository)
2. A Postgres 14 (or higher) database

Domains

On the web, Placemark is served under three domains:

1. app.placemark.io, the main application.
2. api.placemark.io, the API

The API is served from the same web server as the app. This is done by using a Cloudflare Worker which proxies requests from api.placemark.io to app.placemark.io after setting a rule for the paths that can be requested. There's an example of this worker in docs/worker_example.ts.

Testing Local SSL

This probably isn't necessary for anyone: for myself, I was having to test things that only work under SSL, like testing geolocation on an iPhone, and this was required. You probably don't need to use local SSL.

Requires Tailscale with tailscale cert and the certs moved to this directory

caddy start

Using Stripe

Stripe is becoming an optional dependency of this project. There's a webhook proxy in ./_scripts/webhook-proxy.js which you can run optionally by running:

$ yarn dev-with-stripe