London Decompression Membership

Decompression Membership system is website that allows you to have event pages and signups setup for a Decompression event.

Status

Running locally

To run this application locally for development, you will need to install:

• Ruby 3.3.5
  • We recommend rvm, but you could use rbenv or any other technique. The version is specified in .ruby-version
• PostgreSQL
  • For installation on a Mac, we suggest Postgres.app
  • For viewing on other OS's PgAdmin4
• [Optional] Redis

You then need to navigate to the repository's root and run:

• bundle install to install dependencies
• rake db:setup to setup the database

MailCatcher

For access to the emails that'll be generated by the app, that don't go to Mailchimp, we use MailCatcher, as the configuration for the IP address and port are in the .env file.

Per the MailCatcher docs, we don't include it in the Gem file.

To install it run gem install mailcatcher then, simply run mailcatcher in the console and it will spawn in the browser at ${IP_ADDRESS}:1080

A note, if you have a remote setup for development, you will need to use the --ip argument when running mailcatcher to force it to the right address.

Contributing

I would be ecstatic if some other people contributed some code. Please do so by forking this repository, making your changes there, and then making a Github Pull Request.

Please make sure that the test suite passes. To run the test suite, simply run rake from the repository root. If you are making functional changes, please create or update some rspec specs. I can help with this if you need.

Using this for other events

Currently references to London Decompression are hardcoded in the code, as well as images, styles etc. So if you want to use this for another event, you will either need to fork this repository and edit them manually, or preferably make a Pull Request that makes it easy to customise these things! Or ask me to do it, and I'll see if I can make the time.

Deploy to Heroku

Update: we have since moved London Decompression to be hosted with fly.io

Heroku makes it easy to host Ruby on Rails applications, and this app can be run on a free dino (although you will need to pay $7/month if you want HTTPS)

Before you can deploy this application to Heroku, you will need to get the above credentials from Eventbrite, but instead of putting them into .env, you will be asked for them.

To get started click the button below.

Third Party Systems

This app uses the following third-party systems to work:

• EventBrite
• MailChimp
• Postmark
• Plausible.io (Optional)

Setting up Eventbrite

You will need to set up an Eventbrite account and retrieve some credentials to set up the integration.

Eventbrite Access Token

• Visit https://www.eventbrite.com/account-settings/apps
• Click 'Create a new app'
• Fill in details and submit
• Copy 'Private token' and set it as eventbrite_token in your Event

Eventbrite Event ID

• Create an event if you haven't already
• Go to the page to manage the event
• The URL should be something like https://www.eventbrite.com/myevent?eid=11111
• Copy the ID after eid= and set it as eventbrite_id in your Event

Environment Variables

MAILCHIMP_TOKEN

Optionally, if you want members to be added to a Mailchimp account:

• Go to your Mailchimp account page
• Go to 'API keys' under 'Extras'
• Create a key, and then copy to value into your .env as MAILCHIMP_TOKEN

Members will then be added to your first mailchimp list when they confirm their email address.

They will have the tag member, and additionally will have the tag mailchimp-marketing if they opted in for marketing.

POSTMARK_API_TOKEN

This app currently uses postmark to send emails. Set your API token using this env variable.

NOTE: In development mode, we are using mailcatcher instead so we can still get the emails, without using up the Postmark API limits.

RECAPTCHA_SITE_KEY & RECAPTCHA_SECRET_KEY

Unfortunately we were getting too many spam registrations, so we're now using Google recaptcha. Register for a v3 account at https://www.google.com/recaptcha/about/

ENABLE_PLAUSIBLE_IO_ANALYTICS

To give the lightest weight analytics of what goes on with the website, you can use plausible.io analytics, it allows for minimal analytics on a website.

You will need an account with them to be able to use the system, but as this should only run in production, it should be left as false.

Once enabled, it uses the HOST_NAME environment variable to populate the data-domain for the script.

In your Plausible analytics account, from the logged in page, click add website, fill in the data for the site e.g members.londondecom.org and you are done! Once the site is live and analytics are enabled it will start recording!

REDIS_HOST & REDIS_PORT

Add these values to enable the Redis caching, the default TTL for all cache items is 90 mins, unless specified in code.

We don't use any caching outside of Redis at the current time, and if not enabled will still function as normal.

This is being used to both prevent excess calls to Eventbrite and speed up page loading via fragment caching

ROLLBAR_ACCESS_TOKEN

Enables the Rollbar gem to upload application errors into the Rollbar portal.

Development Only Environment Variables

USE_LOCAL_SSL

This is not a requirement at all, however, if you want to use an SSL cert whilst developing the site, you can set this to true and the site will now be under https!

When you launch the site via command line, you will need to run the command rails s -b 'ssl://localhost:3000?key=../server.key&cert=../server.crt'

Update the paths of the .key and .crt files as needed.

DATABASE_URL

This is ONLY if your PostgreSQL server is not on the same machine.

MAILCATCHER_SMTP_IP_ADDRESS & MAILCATCHER_SMTP_PORT

By default these will default to 127.0.0.1 and 1025 respectively, however, if you have a remote setup where the code is running on a remote machine, you can set these to access mailcatcher from a different IP address.

Development Note

In dev, you can enable caching (in memory) by running rails dev:cache to toggle local caching.

It will handle Action Controller caching, which is disabled by default in lower environments, but active in production.

This will use the :memory_store cache, however, if any of the redis values are set, it is superseded by them.

Making admin users

There is a small admin interface to this application. To access it, you need to be logged in as a user with admin privileges. Currently this can only be done over the command line.

First, register as a normal user, and then run a Rails console. If you are working locally, then it is rails console. If you want to do this on a Heroku instance, then run heroku run rails console. Then run:

user = User.find_by(email: 'REPLACE_WITH_EMAIL_ADDRESS')
user.admin = true
user.save!

Codes

For members to be able to buy tickets using their accounts, membership codes need to be imported into Eventbrite, and assigned as access tokens to a hidden ticket.

• Make sure you have set up a ticket type for the event in Eventbrite, and ensure 'Hide this ticket type' is checked for it. This is to ensure that non-members cannot buy this ticket.
• It is possible to have multiple tickets that are hidden in this way.
• Log into the membership app with an admin account, and go to the admin 'Membership Codes' page.
• Ensure you have enough membership codes generated for your need. Be generous (if you have 1,000 people, maybe generate 1,500 codes). This is to ensure we don't run out of access tokens. If not, generate some codes.
• Download the CSV file on that page.
  • Update: Eventbrite has restricted uploads to 500 at a time, so use a CSV splitter to split your file if you have more than 500 codes
• Go to "Manage" for your Eventbrite event. Go to "Tickets" then "Promo Codes".
• Add your first file
• From "Ticket Limit", choose "Limited To", and then input the number of tickets you want each member to be allowed to buy. Our current plan is to allow 1 ticket per member.
• Check "Reveal hidden tickets during checkout"
• Choose "Apply code to" "Only certain hidden tickets", then click "Select" and choose the ticket type you want.
• Click "Save" > Done!

Events

When you create an event as an admin user you will notice there is an active status as well as as an event mode.

You will need to have an event in EventBrite for the system to work, as we rely on data stored against the EventBrite event for the system pages.

When creating the event, you can put an event into Draft without having any EventBrite data, but once it goes to Prerelease or above, it will be required.

Active Flag

• Active event means that this is the current active event that we will pull forward to the front-end
• Inactive events will not be loaded to the front-end

Event Mode

• Draft - Means you are building up the event data, but it is not shown to the users
• Prerelease - Means you have information about the event that you want to show users, but ticket sales aren't yet live
• Live - Shockingly means the event is live and users can book tickets
• Ended - Event has finished

Note

The fields Event Timings, Theme Details and Further Information are multiline and will save the line breaks, meaning what you type in the box will be what you get (within reason) on the front end.

Scheduler

We are now using whenever to schedule rake tasks using cron.

Locally you don't need to worry about this, if you do want to test out the cron, simply run whenever --update-crontab --set environment='development'

On the server it will automatically run the required command to set up the cron events.

Currently we have the following scheduled tasks running:

users:purge_old_users - Runs weekly at 3am, removed any user who hasn't confirmed their account in a year