helfffen

helfffen allows you to show people how they can help your organisation and let them contact you.

helfen is a German verb that translates to to help. The three fs play on the original audience for this project: People who would like to help Fridays for Future (FFF) with predefined and fixed-scope tasks.

Features

• Tasks overview 📝
• Tasks disappear when maximum needed helpers have applied or expiration date is hit 👻
• Contact person shown to applicant after applying to a task ☎️
• Overview of all potential helpers in the admin area, filterable by task 🧭

Deploy using container image 🚢

Two types of container images are built automatically from this repository.

1. Each release is built and tagged with its version when it is released.
   • These are the most stable but if they are older than one month you should consider using the next type, which always contains the latest security fixes.
2. Every time main is updated, an image is built and tagged latest.
   • Additionally, the image tagged latest is rebuilt once a week to incorporate the latest updates from the base image.

You need to provide a PostgreSQL database connection and other information using the environment variables described in src/example.env.

You can deploy this image anywhere OCI container images are supported using Kubernetes, Docker Swarm or any other tool of your choosing.

Instantly run a local demo

Instantly run a local instance of helfffen using podman, docker or any other container engine.

First, start the container.

docker run --rm -e HELFFFEN_USE_SQLITE=True -e HELFFFEN_ALLOWED_HOSTS=localhost -e HELFFFEN_CSRF_TRUSTED_ORIGINS=http://localhost:8082 -v helfffen-db:/app/src/persistent_db --name helfffen-localhost -p 8082:80 ghcr.io/wolfskaempf/helfffen:latest

Then, in a separate shell window you'll need to run database migrations to initialise the SQLite database and create an administrative account by running the following command.

docker exec -i -t helfffen-localhost /bin/sh -c "python manage.py migrate && python manage.py createsuperuser"

Now you can access your local instance at http://localhost:8082/ and the administrative area at http://localhost:8082/admin/

If you have any feedback, do not hesitate to contact me or open an issue.

Deploy using Caprover

Caprover is a tool that turns your personal VPS into a Platform as a Service comparable to dokku or Heroku.

1. Get started with Caprover on your VPS and your CLI
2. Create a One-Click-Postgres app and remember the data you chose (app name, default database, user and password).
3. Create a new app named anything you like in the Caprover interface. This tutorial will go with helfen for the app name.
4. Inside the HTTP Settings section of the new app enable HTTPS and select Force HTTPS by redirecting all HTTP traffic to HTTPS
5. Inside the App Configs section of the new app configure the app specific environment variables described in src/example.env

• Ensure you have added all environment variables that start with HELFFFEN (do not copy the POSTGRES variables into the App Configs section of the helfen app)
• Ensure the database connection information matches the database you created earlier
  • The HELFFFEN_POSTGRES_HOST can be found in the app overview of the database you created earlier
  • It should look something like this srv-captain--helfffen-db where helfffen-db is the name you selected for your database
  • Ensure you include only the hostname and no protocol (such as https://) in HELFFFEN_POSTGRES_HOST

6. On your local machine run git clone https://github.com/wolfskaempf/helfffen.git && cd helfffen to clone this repository and change directory into it.
7. Run npx caprover deploy and select your server and the app you just created
   • If this command doesn't exist, make sure that you followed Step 3 of Getting Started with Caprover