Code for a web server that facilitates uploading emailed photos to a website. I have a site where I post photos. It used to be hosted on Tumblr, but then Tumblr stopped allowing post-by-email. Now the site is hosted on GitHub Pages and I built this application to allow post-by-email.
The server listens for webhooks from SendGrid. When it receives a notification that an email was received, it downloads the attached photo (and some metadata), resizes it, creates a new post on the GitHub Pages site's repository, and pushes it (which republishes the website.)
It's implemented in Python using Bottle.
python -m unittest test_server.py
You can run a script that sends emails to notify subscribers of new
posts. Each time it runs, it calculates the number of new posts by comparing the
ID of the current latest post to the ID of the latest post from the last time
it ran (which it stores—and updates—in a file named latest.txt.) I
run it weekly, using cron. To set it up,
Find the ID of the current latest post on your site. You can go to your site and
click on the first post you see. It will direct you to that post's page, and the
new URL will end with a number. That number is the ID of the current latest post.
If you don't have any posts, use 0.
echo 123 > latest.txt
latest.txt should be in the root directory of this repository.
The script reads in a JSON-formatted file that lists the subscribers that will
receive notifications. Copy the following contents into a file named
emails.json, and then customize it for your own subscribers.
{
"recipients": [
{
"address": "[email protected]",
"text": "Hi Name!\n\nHope you had a nice weekend. There {has} been {n} new {post} since last week. You can see {it} at http://blog.example.com/.\n\nWarmly,\nAaron",
"html": "<html><p>Hi Name!</p><p>Hope you had a nice weekend. There {has} been <strong style=\"color: #2e8540;\">{n}</strong> new {post} since last week. You can see {it} <a href=\"http://blog.example.com/\">on the blog</a>.</p><p>Warmly,<br>Aaron</p></html>"
}
]
}To add more subscribers, just copy, paste, and edit the inner block of JSON. The keywords surrounded by curly braces will automatically be replaced. You should just edit the address, the names, and the blog URL in the above snippet.
notify.py uses the following configuration parameters, so make sure they're
in your config.ini.
| Parameter | Description |
|---|---|
domain |
The domain name where your blog is hosted. |
notify-name |
Your name. |
notify-from |
The email address from which to send the messages. It has to exist in your SendGrid account! |
notify-bcc |
An email address to BCC on the messages, just to stay in the loop. I use my personal email address. |
notify-reply-to |
An email address to use for the Reply-To header. Subscribers that click "Reply" will be emailing this address. |
notify-url |
This should be https://api.sendgrid.com/v3/mail/send. I think I made it configurable for testing? |
sendgrid-key |
An API key for SendGrid, which you generate in the dashboard. |
With the above steps complete, you should be able to do a test run:
DRY=1 pipenv run python notify.pyYou should see output that looks roughly like this:
Sending update to [email protected]
Updates sent successfully
From the server, run crontab -e. Add the following line to the bottom of the file.
0 0 * * 1 cd /path/to/uploader && /home/<user>/.pyenv/shims/pipenv run python notify.py > notify.log 2>&1
Change <user> to your username, and change /path/to/uploader to the absolute path
to the directory that contains notify.py.
This cron job will run every Sunday at midnight. You can change the frequency by changing the cron schedule expression. I recommend using crontab.guru for that.
Save the file and exit.