Note: This is the latest version (pre-2.0) of Houdini and is currently in HEAVY development. You may want to use v1 instead.
The Houdini Project is free and open source fundraising infrastructure. It includes...
- Crowdfunding campaigns
- Donate widget page and generator
- Fundraising events
- Nonprofit Profiles
- Nonprofit payment history and payouts dashboard
- Nonprofit recurring donation management dashboard
- Nonprofit metrics overview / business intelligence dashboard
- Nonprofit supporter relationship management dashboard (CRM)
- Nonprofit org user account management
- Simple donation management for donors
The frontend is written in a few custom frameworks, the largest of which is called Flimflam. We endeavor to migrate to React as quickly as possible to increase development comfort and speed.
All new backend code and React components should be well tested.
Houdini is designed and tested to run with the following:
- Ruby 2.7
- Node 14
- Yarn
- PostgreSQL 10 or 12
- Ubuntu 18.04, 20.04 or equivalent
Houdini's success depends on you!
https://github.com/houdiniproject/houdini/discussions
Visit the Discussions tab on Houdini GitHub and discuss
Check on contribution_guide_usability_testing.md and create an issue with your test design or run test sessions for opened usability testing issues.
Houdini requires a few pieces of software be installed, as well as some optional pieces which make development much easier.
These include:
- PostgreSQL 12 (10 probably works)
- NodeJS 14 (we require 14 because we want the full internationalization built-in)
- Ruby 2.7.5
There a few optional tools which make working on Houdini easier
- Ruby Version Manager (RVM) - RVM makes it simple to switch between versions of Ruby for different projects. Additionally, you can use different "gemsets" per version so you can separate the state of a set of different projects. It will also switch versions at the console when you change to a directory for an project prepared for RVM, like Houdini.
- Automatic Version Switching for Node (AVN) - similar to RVM, AVN makes it simple to switch between versions of Node. When properly configured, it automatically switches version at the console whe you change to a directory for a project prepared for AVN, like Houdini.
You'll want to run the next commands as root or via sudo (for Ubuntu 18.04 users or anyone running ProgresSQL 10, change "postgresql-12" below to "postgresql-10"). You could do this by typing sudo /bin/sh
running the commands from there.
apt update
apt install curl -yy
curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_14.x | bash -
curl -sS https://dl.yarnpkg.com/debian/pubkey.gpg | apt-key add -
echo "deb https://dl.yarnpkg.com/debian/ stable main" | tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/yarn.list
apt update
apt install git postgresql-12 libpq-dev libjemalloc-dev libvips42 yarn -yy
You'll run the next commands as your normal user.
Note: in the case of a production instance, this might be your web server's user.
Note: We use RVM to have more control over the exact version of Ruby. For development, it's also way easier because you can use a consistent version of Ruby (and different sets of installed gems) for different projects. You could also use rbenv or simply build ruby from source.
Note: We recommend building Ruby with jemalloc support as we do in these instructions. In practice, it manages memory far more efficiently in Rails-based projects.
Tip: To get out of the root shell, run
exit
# add rvm keys
curl -sSL https://rvm.io/mpapis.asc | gpg --import -
curl -sSL https://rvm.io/pkuczynski.asc | gpg --import -
curl -sSL https://get.rvm.io | bash -s stable
source $HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm
echo 'source "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm"' >> ~/.bashrc
rvm install 2.7.5 --disable-binary --with-jemalloc
Run the following command as the postgres
user and then enter your houdini_user
password at the prompt.
Note: For development, Houdini expects the password to be 'password'. This would be terrible for production but for development, it's likely not a huge issue.
Tip: To run this, add
sudo -u postgres
to the beginning of the following command.
createuser houdini_user -s -d -P
Now that we have all of our prerequisites prepared, we need to get the Houdini code.
git clone https://github.com/HoudiniProject/houdini
This will download the latest Houdini code. Change to the
houdini
directory and we can set the rest of Houdini up.
Let's run the Houdini project setup and we'll be ready to go! P
bin/setup
Note: The .env file holds your environment variables for development; on production you might have these set somewhere else other than this file.
Tip: On Heroku, the environment variables are set in your Dashboard.
Also, you should set the STRIPE_API_KEY and STRIPE_API_PUBLIC environment variables which you'd get from the Stripe dashboard. On your development environment, make sure to use test keys. If you don't, you're going to be charged real money!
To verify everying is set up correctly, you can try running through the Ruby test cases:
./bin/rails spec
You should expect to see the output of the test execution, including messages about pending test cases, and eventually get the output to the effect of below:
Finished in 6 minutes 25 seconds (files took 10.35 seconds to load)
2433 examples, 0 failures, 42 pending
Coverage report generated for RSpec to .../houdini/coverage. 10552 / 12716 LOC (82.98%) covered.
The important thing to look for is that the number of failures is zero.
We also recommend you run through the javascript test cases by running:
yarn jest
Lastly, you can use Storybook to experiment with the various new React components.
yarn storybook
If you create a new React component, make sure you add a storybook and jest tests for that component!
To create a nonprofit, use the command line to run the following command and fill in the questions with the required information:
bin/rails houdini:nonprofit:create
There are available arguments that add congirugrations on the nonprofit's creation:
-su, [--super-admin], [--no-super-admin] # Make the nonprofit admin a super user (they can access any nonprofit's dashboards)
[--confirm-admin], [--no-confirm-admin] # Require the nonprofit admin to be confirmed via email
# Default: true
Additionally, it is possible to provide arguments to fill in the fields for the nonprofit creation without coming across the questions:
[--nonprofit-name=NONPROFIT_NAME] # Provide the nonprofit's name
[--state-code=STATE_CODE] # Provide the nonprofit' state code
[--city=CITY] # Provide the nonprofit's city
[--nonprofit-website=NONPROFIT_WEBSITE] # Provide the nonprofit public website
[--nonprofit-email=NONPROFIT_EMAIL] # Provide the nonprofit public email
[--user-name=USER_NAME] # Provide the nonprofit's admin's name
[--user-email=USER_EMAIL] # Provide the nonprofit's admin's email address (It'll be used for logging in)
[--user-phone=USER_PHONE] # [OPTIONAL] Provide the nonprofit's 's phone
[--user-password=USER_PASSWORD] # Provide the nonprofit's admin's password
You can use this in the future for creating additional nonprofits.
bin/rails server
You can connect to your server at http://localhost:5000
There is a way to set your user as a super_admin. This role lets you access any of the nonprofits
on your Houdini instance. Additionally, it gives you access to the super admin control panel to search all supporters and
nonprofits, which is located at /admin
url.
To create the super user, go to the rails console by calling:
bin/rails console
In the console, run the following:
admin=User.find(1) #or the id of the user you want to add the role
role=Role.create(user:admin,name: "super_admin")
We use Rubocop
to perform static code analysis:
rubocop
We have some additional documentation describing some implementations, definitions and other guides on the docs folder.
For a list of how to solve known issues
You will likely want to make a few changes in your configuration of Houdini before running in production as you would for any Rails project. These include:
- Use a proper cache store. The development uses
memory_store
which isn't shared between processes or server and clears every time your server software restarts. Memcached or Redis are good choices here.
Note: This is not legal advice and provides a suggestion which may be compliant. You should talk with your legal counsel if you have questions or concerns with how to comply with the various licenses of Houdini.
Providing the complete, corresponding source code (CCS) of your project is a requirement of some of the licenses used by Houdini. There are two methods for doing so right now:
- Providing a tarball of the current running code
- Providing a link to Github where the code is pulled from
The easiest method is to provide a tarball. Houdini automatically provides a link on the Terms & Privacy page which generates a tarball for the current running code at runtime. For this to work though, the following characteristics must be true:
- Your have to have committed any changes you made to the project in
HEAD
in your git repository - The
.git
folder for your repository must be a direct subfolder of your$RAILS_ROOT
- Your web server must be able to run
git archive