Random xkcd comic emailer

This project is built using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, and MySQL for storing the data.

The live demo link for the app: https://emaaail.herokuapp.com/index.php

Requirements

• PHP 8 and above
• Google account

Configuration

After cloning the repository you need to go to google scripts and create new project.

• In the newly created project now go to code.gs file and paste all the content from email/code.gs file.
• Also create two new files (comic.html and token.html) and past their content in them.
• Now deploy the project (create new web app) with the default setting (make sure to change the access to anyone if not anyone) after that copy the app url and add as environmental variable.

After that you need to configure environmental variables for the project.

Note: as I am using remotemysql as my database the database name and user are same for me; you can change this by going to configs/database.php file.

DB_HOST=<your-database-host>
DB_PASSWORD=<your-database-password>
DB_USER=<your-database-user>
GOOGLE_APP_SCRIPT_URL=<your-google-app-script-url>
CRON_SECRET=<your-cron-secret> # you can set this value to any secret you like

Folder Structure

• assets directory contains all the static CSS and JavaScript file required by the project
• components directory contains the UI components used in the project
• configs directory contains database configuration files
• email directory contains the email templates and the google app script file
• src directory contains the user and email classes
• index.php is the landing page of the project
• about.php is the about page of the project
• getting-started.php is the page where user enter their info
• token-verification.php is the page for verifying the user's email address by using token
• success.php is the page where user user reaches after successfully subscribing/unsubscribing
• cron.php is used for sending comics to the subscribed users every 5 minutes. This page only accepts the get request which contains the secret as its parameter. If the secret and env variable CRON_SECRET are same only then the emails are sent.

The reason why cron job is in the root dir is because I'm using cron-job.org; It makes a GET request to the project every 5 minutes and hence the emails are sent to the subscribed users

Usage

Run index.php in your browser.

Google Apps Script only allows 100 emails per day so if the limit is exceeded please try again next day