Freevite

Freevite is a service for managing events and sending invites to friends.

The production instance is free to use, and this code is open source if you want to learn how it works or host your own instance.

Why is it called Freevite?

Free means free. I won't charge you to invite your friends to your Halloween party. Learn more on the homepage.

Architecture

This app is built on RedwoodJS, a full-stack TypeScript framework. Check out the readme and tutorial to learn more about Redwood.

In production, I use the following stack:

Hosting: Netlify
DB: Postgres via neon.tech
Outbound email: AWS SES

This repo is set up with CI/CD which automatically deploys main to production.

Development

Alias rw to make it easier to run commands: alias rw='yarn redwood'

Run the dev server: rw dev
Regenerate types: rw g types This is usually done automatically while the dev server runs, but sometimes running this command helps get rid of red squiggles. Use it liberally.
Run tests: rw test
Run type checks: rw type-check
Run the same checks that CI does: yarn preflight

Environment Variables

Example values are provided in .env.example. Make a copy of that file named .env, then edit those values to set up your local development environment.

Name	Type	Required?	Description
API_URL	string		URL to the API server. When running locally, this should be `/.redwood/functions`. `redwood.toml` sets this to the Netlify value if unset.
DATABASE_URL	string	yes	The DB connection string which includes protocol, username, password, port, DB name, and options
DISCORD_WEBHOOK_URL	string		If provided, send notifications for server events to this Discord channel via webhook
FROM_EMAIL	string	yes	The “from” address on outgoing emails
FROM_NAME	string	yes	The human-readable “from” name on outgoing emails
LOCAL_CHROMIUM	string		Path to the Chromium binary, used to generate Open Graph event preview images
SENTRY_DSN	string	yes	DSN URL for your Sentry project, where errors are reported
SITE_HOST	string	yes	The hostname of your Freevite instance, used in absolute URLs (e.g. email content)
SMTP_HOST	string	yes	Hostname for your SMTP outgoing mail server
SMTP_PASS	string	yes	Password for your SMTP outgoing mail server
SMTP_USER	string	yes	Username for your SMTP outgoing mail server
TEST_DATABASE_URL	string		The connection string for the DB instance used when running tests. If not provided, defaults to `./.redwood/test.db`.

Contributions