OpenCollective API

Foreword

If you see a step below that could be improved (or is outdated), please update the instructions. We rarely go through this process ourselves, so your fresh pair of eyes and your recent experience with it, makes you the best candidate to improve them for other users. Thank you!

Development

Prerequisite

1. Make sure you have Node.js version >= 10.

• We recommend using nvm: nvm use.

2. Make sure you have a PostgreSQL database available

• Check the version: 10.3, 9.6.8, 9.5.12, 9.4.17, 9.3.22 or newer
• Check that the PostGIS extension is available

3. For node-gyp, make sure you have Python 2 available and configured as the active version. You can use pyenv to manage Python versions.

Install

We recommend cloning the repository in a folder dedicated to opencollective projects.

git clone git@github.com:opencollective/opencollective-api.git opencollective/api
cd opencollective/api
npm install

Start

npm run dev

Troubleshooting

• If you're running into node-gyp issues related to Python 3 vs Python 2, you can run: npm rebuild
• The postinstall script should bootstrap the database along with some seed data. If it failed, you can try again with: npm run db:setup && npx babel-node ./scripts/db_restore.js opencollective_dvl

Local Email

Email templates can be viewed locally by running npm run compile:email <template name> and making sure there is data for that template in scripts/compile-email.js.

Email sending can done by running npm run maildev locally and setting the MAILDEV environment variable to true. Then open http://localhost:1080 to see any outgoing emails from the opencollective-api server.

Deployment

To deploy to staging or production, you need to be a core member of the Open Collective team.

(Optional) Configure Slack token

Setting a Slack token will post a message on #engineering with the changes you're about to deploy. It is not required, but you can activate it like this:

1. Go to https://api.slack.com/custom-integrations/legacy-tokens
2. Generate a token for the OpenCollective workspace
3. Add this token to your .env file:

OC_SLACK_USER_TOKEN=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Staging (heroku)

npm run deploy:staging

URL: https://api-staging.opencollective.com/

Production (heroku)

npm run deploy:production

URL: https://api.opencollective.com/

More documentation:

• List of supported environment variables

Data exports

We generate once a month data exports to https://drive.opencollective.com. This contains a list of top backers, top collectives and all transactions of the month. To run the data export, run: npm run export:csv.

Discussion

If you have any questions, ping us on Slack (https://slack.opencollective.org) or on Twitter (@opencollect).