inviteyoself

Allow people to invite themselves to your Slack team.

This makes a website where users enter their email, and an invite will automatically be mailed to them from your Slack. Users can accept the invitation and join your Slack without needing you (the admin) to do any work.

Note: This is not using the Slack API, it is mechanizing the website. So you have to give Heroku (or your own server) your actual admin email and password, not an API token.

Important Note

This has only been tested with the free plan, but it should work with a paid plan too. If it doesn't, please file a ticket.

Installation

This was setup for Heroku, so that is the suggested platform. Otherwise, you will need to provide leiningen, postgres, and casperjs yourself.

• Install leiningen using its install script (don't use apt).
• Clone this project and cd into its directory..
• Add an application to Heroku.
• Add a Heroku git remote to this project:

heroku git:remote -a yourherokuapp`

• Add Postgres to your application:

heroku addons:add heroku-postgresql:dev

• Add Heroku scheduler to your application:

heroku addons:add scheduler

• Set the environment variables for the application, substituting your own values for those shown. Start with the Slack details:

heroku config:add SLACK_SUBDOMAIN=yourteam
heroku config:add SLACK_USERNAME=youremail
heroku config:add SLACK_PASSWORD=yourpassword

• Then set your Postgres details. Find them by visiting your app's Resources tab in Heroku, then clicking the "Heroku Postgres :: Aqua" link. This should take you to a page with your assigned Postgres DB settings.

heroku config:add DB_HOST=yourhost
heroku config:add DB_NAME=yourdatabase
heroku config:add DB_USER_NAME=youruser
heroku config:add DB_USER_PASSWORD=yourpassword

• Finally, set the buildpack URL to a specific URL:

heroku config:add BUILDPACK_URL=https://github.com/ddollar/heroku-buildpack-multi.git

• Run the migrations (locally). Substitute the all-caps variables below for the same values you set on your Heroku server in the previous step.

lein ragtime migrate -d "jdbc:postgresql://DB_HOST:5432/DB_NAME?user=DB_USER_NAME&password=DB_USER_PASSWORD&ssl=true&sslfactory=org.postgresql.ssl.NonValidatingFactory"

• Visit Heroku scheduler in your browser and add the following task to run every 10 minutes: lein send-invites

• Push to Heroku to deploy the app:

git push heroku master

• Visit the app in the browser at https://yourappname.herokuapp.com and give it a shot! Test it with something other than your own admin email, of course.

Environment Variables

To set an environment variable, run heroku config:add NAME_OF_VARIABLE=SOMEVALUE in the root of your project.

• SLACK_SUBDOMAIN
  • The subdomain for your Slack team. e.g. If your Slack team url is https://myslackteam.slack.com, your subdomain is myslackteam.
• SLACK_USERNAME
  • The username for an admin user on the Slack team. Should be an email address.
• SLACK_PASSWORD
  • The password for the SLACK_USERNAME.
• DB_HOST
  • The postgres host.
• DB_NAME
  • The name of the database in Postgres that the application will be using.
• DB_USER_NAME
  • The postgres database user to access DB_NAME.
• DB_USER_PASSWORD
  • The password for DB_USER_NAME.
• BUILDPACK_URL
  • This should always be: https://github.com/ddollar/heroku-buildpack-multi.git

Local development

If you're developing this app locally, you will need the following: casperjs, postgres, leiningen, java (OpenJDK 6 and 7 both work.)

Styles

I'm using compass to compile sass. Run compass watch from resources/vendor/ and edit the sass files in the sass folder.

Environment Variables

In project.clj, look for {:dev true :db-user-name "postgres" :db-user-password "password" :db-host "localhost" :db-name "inviteyoself"}, these correspond to the environment variables above. Add the correct keys and values for your system.

Running

To start a web server for the application, run: lein ring server.

If you want to run the invite runner, run: lein send-invites.

License

Under the MIT License.