Helpful

Help shouldn't hurt.

Helpful is an open product that's being built by a fantastic group of people on Assembly. Anybody can join in building this product and earn a stake of the profit.

Getting Started

If you're running Windows, here's a guide written by one of our members on how to get set up.

Vagrant is the recommended way to run Helpful on your own machine. You need to download and install Vagrant before you can continue (this will take a while to run so you may want to grab some coffee).

git clone https://github.com/asm-helpful/helpful-web.git helpful-web
cd helpful-web
vagrant up

Once it's finished open up http://localhost:5000 in your web browser to check out Helpful.

Gems Installation and Database Migration

Remember that you are using Vagrant, so if you run bundle install or rake db:migrate directly in your terminal it will not affect the virtual machine where Helpful is running.

In order to run these commands, in the virtual machine, all you have to do is to run vagrant provision.

Environment Variables

If you need to change any environment variable you have to edit .env file properly and restart Rails server running:

vagrant ssh -c "sudo restart helpful"

Using Helpful

To create a new account for Helpful, click "Sign Up" on the homepage.

Advanced Email Configuration

Sending with Gmail

In your .env file, change the below values for your own email and password:

USE_GMAIL=true
SENDER_EMAIL_ADDRESS="email@example.com"
SENDER_EMAIL_PASSWORD="PassWord"

Save and restart the app (sudo restart helpful on vagrant)

Receiving with Mailgun (optional)

Setting up Mailgun in development takes a little work but allows you to use the actual email workflow used in production.

1. Register for a free account at https://mailgun.com.
2. Get your Mailgun API key from https://mailgun.com/cp it starts with "key-" and add it to your .env file as MAILGUN_API_KEY.
3. Get your Mailgun test subdomain from the same page and add it to your .env file as INCOMING_EMAIL_DOMAIN.
4. In order to recieve webhooks from Mailgun we need to expose our development instance to the outside world. We can use a tool called Ngrok for this. Download and setup Ngrok by following the instructions on the Ngrok site.
5. Run rake mailgun to make sure everything is setup right. It should prompt you to create a route using rake mailgun:create_route.
6. Run rake mailgun:create_route and when prompted enter your Ngrok address as the domain name.
7. Send a test email to helpful@INCOMING_EMAIL_DOMAIN and you should see it appear in the helpful account.

Contributing

There are a couple of steps you need to take before contributing:

1. Go to https://assemblymade.com and sign up.
2. Link your GitHub account to your Assembly account in your profile settings.
3. Create a new WIP at https://assemblymade.com/helpful/wips. Think of WIPs as GitHub issues.

Then just go ahead, fork the repo & issue a pull request. You're on your way to having a stake in Helpful.