Collecte - self-hosted open source email collector

Collect emails on your static website into your private git repo. The solution is targeted at people who already have a Linux server and domain, or don’t mind to get one. You have to be familiar with basics of operating a web server. No Python knowledge is required, but service is going to use it.

Prerequisites

• You’ll need to host a Linux server somewhere.

• You’ll need a domain to serve the API requests.

• It can be a tiny virtual machine, like Google’s free tier f1-micro.

• It can be a Heroku node, which will save a few minutes configuring nginx.

• You’ll need to be familiar with shell to install and configure service.

• The page with the email signup form can be hosted anywhere, for example on GitHub pages.

What you get

Python service running on a virtual machine using systemd unit. Nginx serving a single API endpoint. Private git repository, that stores all submitted emails into a plain text file.

How it works

• Service accepts POST requests at /singup.

• Appends the received email to emails.txt.

• Commits changes.

• Pushes the commit to the upstream.

• Redirects user to “thanks” page.

How to install

Instruction are written for Ubuntu Linux, but can be applied to any other Linux distribution.

1. Create a system user to run the service. sudo adduser --system collecte --home /var/lib/collecte

2. Setup git repo for saving emails. cd /var/lib/collecte && sudo -u collecte git init .

3. Create an SSH key pair to push the repo. sudo -u collecte ssh-keygen

4. Make sure the public key is accepted at the upstream git repo.

5. Install collecte inside of a virtualenv.

   sudo su collecte
   python3 -m venv /var/lib/collecte/.venv
   source /var/lib/collecte/.venv/bin/activate
   pip install collecte
   exit
   

6. Create systemd unit.

   sudo cat >/etc/systemd/system/collecte.service <<EOF
   [Unit]
   Description=collecte HTTP API
   After=network.target
   StartLimitIntervalSec=0
   Environment="PORT=7777"
   Environment="REDIRECT_URL=https://your-static-website.com/thanks"
   
   [Service]
   Type=simple
   User=collecte
   ExecStart=/var/lib/collecte/.venv/bin/collecte
   
   [Install]
   WantedBy=multi-user.target
   

7. Enable and start the service.

   sudo systemctl daemon-reload
   sudo systemctl enable collecte.service
   sudo systemctl start collecte.service
   

8. Install nginx. sudo apt install nginx

9. Configure nginx to proxy pass requests to the collecte service. Edit /etc/nginx/sites-available/default to have the following section.

   location /signup {
       proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:7777;
   }
   

10. Ensure nginx configuration is valid and restart nginx.

sudo nginx -t && sudo systemctl restart nginx.service