Constable

Constable is part of the thoughtbot Elixir family of projects.

Constable is a Phoenix app for posting announcements and having discussions. To learn more about Phoenix, check out Programming Phoenix

Starting the Console

Use

bin/console

bin/console staging|production

Reactivating Users

Users are deactivated if they leave thoughtbot. Sometimes someone with the same first name joins thoughtbot later and inherits the deactivated email so we need to reactivate the email. There are two ways to reactivate a user:

1. From the browser:

   • Visit

     /user_activations

   • Click on Activate the user

2. From the console:

   • Run

     bin/console production

   • Run

     Constable.User.reactivate("[email protected]")

Developing the Application

To set up your development environment, there are a few steps you'll need to follow.

Install Required Dependencies

You need to have Erlang, Elixir, Node and ChromeDriver installed. This section describes the easiest way to do that.

If you're on OS X and using Homebrew, run

brew install node

Once node is installed, run

npm -g install chromedriver

Finally, install the asdf package manager, which will read the

.tool-versions

asdf install

Configure Your Local Environment

Run:

  # Will grab all Elixir and NPM dependencies and then setup the database
  $ bin/setup

Set up local data and env vars for Google OAuth

You'll want to have certain environment variables and user data set up so you can log into the app locally with your thoughtbot email.

In

.env

heroku config -r staging

You'll also want to grab the STAGINGDBENVVAR from staging. Run: `heroku pg:pull STAGINGDBENVVAR constableapidevelopment -r staging`, where the value of STAGINGDBENV_VAR is what you got from the heroku config. This will copy the data over so you have example data to work with, including your already existing user account.

Starting the Phoenix Server

Once all the dependencies have been installed, you can start the Phoenix server with:

  $ mix phx.server

Email Templates

You can edit the email contents from

web/templates/email

You can preview templates by going to

localhost:4000/emails/#{template_name}

EmailPreviewController

Viewing Sent Emails

You can view sent emails in development by going to

localhost:4000/sent_emails

Testing

Run

mix test

Static Analysis

Run

mix dialyzer

.dialyzer.plt

mix dialyzer.plt

There are still a lot of warnings that are not fixable, but occasionally some real errors are found by dialyzer

Deployment

1. If you have not run

   bin/setup

   yet, run it to add the correct git remotes.
2. Run

   bin/deploy (staging|production)

Review Apps

Constable is setup with support for Heroku Review Apps.

Google enforces a white list of OAuth redirect URLs, so for review apps we redirect the OAuth flow through the Constable oauth redirector which then redirects back to the correct review app. This is configured with the

OAUTH_REDIRECT_OVERRIDE

License

Constable is Copyright (c) 2015-2016 Blake Williams, Paul Smith, and thoughtbot, inc. It is free software, and may be redistributed under the AGPL license detailed in the LICENSE file.

About thoughtbot

Constable is maintained and funded by thoughtbot, inc. The names and logos for thoughtbot are trademarks of thoughtbot, inc.

We love open source software, Elixir, and Phoenix. Work with thoughtbot's Elixir development team to design, develop, and grow your product.