Monitors an API for new data and sends digest emails to subscribers.
SubscribeMe is meant to be a service for developers who want to let their users subscribe to updates from their application, but aren't thrilled about having to write code for confirmation emails, unsubscribe functionality, scheduling the emails, and worrying about how it will scale. Using SubscribeMe, developers can simply specify the data source's API, configure an email template, and add a "subscribe" button to their application.
SubscribeMe's database has a services table. A service is a data source being
subscribed to. The developer will configure their service, specifying the valid
URL pattern via regex (ie. https:\/\/data.com\/datasets\/[A-Za-z0-9]\.json)
and an email digest template (using handlebars to
inject the data).
The developer can then add a 'subscribe' form to their application for users to
fill in their email address. On submission, the form should send a POST
request to their SubscribeMe service containing the email address and the url
being subscribed to (ie. https://data.com/datasets/crimes.json?date={{ formatDate 'today' 'YYYY-MM-DD' }})
Every day, SubscribeMe will execute the query, render the result into the template, and send an email to all the subscribers of that query.
Currently, SubscribeMe assumes that the query will only return "new" records. Since many APIs don't let you filter by date, though, the goal is for SubscribeMe to determine whether each record has been sent out before and only send new ones (similar to how RSS readers work).
| services | queries | subscribers |
|---|---|---|
| id | id | id |
| name | service_id | query_id |
| slug | url | |
| url_regex | status | |
| subject_template | unsubscribe_token | |
| body_template |
Start database and queue
docker-compose up db queue
Run migrations and load seed data
docker-compose run --rm node npm run db:migratedocker-compose run --rm node npm run db:seed seeds/test_data.yml services queries subscribers
Start consumer
docker-compose run --rm consumer
Run scheduler
docker-compose run --rm scheduler
Deploy application to heroku
In the heroku dashboard of the deployed application, click the MailGun logo.
Alternatively, use the heroku cli to get to your MailGun dashboard.
heroku addons:open mailgun
Add and verify a domain to send email from, or add and verify individual authorized recipients
there isn't really a command to show for this step...
If you added your own domain to mailgun, change the MAILGUN_DOMAIN environment variable in your heroku app.
heroku config:set MAILGUN_DOMAIN=yourdomain.com
Load seed data into your database
heroku run seed seeds/production_data.yml services
Run the scheduler (or set it up using the scheduler add-on)
heroku run scheduler