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sparkypmtatracking

Open and click tracking modules for PMTA and SparkPost Signals:

app (link)	description
feeder	Takes open & click events, adds message attributes from Redis where found, and feeds them to the SparkPost Signals Ingest API
tracker	Web service that decodes client email opens and clicks
acct_etl	Extract, transform, load piped PMTA custom accounting stream message attributes into Redis
wrapper	SMTP proxy service that adds engagement information to email
linktool	Command-line tool to encode and decode link URLs

Click above links for command-specific README.

Install

First, check you have the the pre-requisites (installation tips):

• Git & Golang
• Redis
• NGINX (not strictly required, but recommended)

If you don't have $GOPATH set already:

cd /home/ec2-user/ 
mkdir go
export GOPATH=/home/ec2-user/go # change this to suit the directory you just made

Run

If you just wish to run these programs unchanged, binaries (executables) for various platforms can be downloaded from the project releases area, with 32-bit and 64-bit architecture variants.

• OSX ("Darwin")
• Linux
• Windows
• FreeBSD

The files are in .tar.gz format. For Windows, 7-Zip can open these archives.

Script start.sh is provided as a starting point for you to customise, along with an example cronfile that can be used to start services on boot:

crontab cronfile

or crontab -e then paste in cronfile contents.

Build project from source

Get this project, together with its dependent libraries - Go makes this really easy.

go get github.com/tuck1s/sparkypmtatracking

Compile binaries, which will be placed in the main project folder:

cd sparkypmtatracking
./build.sh

The binaries will be in the main project folder and can be run with (e.g.) ./linktool -h.

CI code tests

The project includes built-in tests as per usual Go / Travis CI / Coveralls practices - see "badges" at top of this

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Pre-requisites

Git and Golang

Your package manager should provide easy installation for these, e.g.

sudo yum install -y git go

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Redis (on Amazon Linux)

sudo yum update -y
sudo amazon-linux-extras install epel # if this command not available, use yum install -y epel-release
sudo yum install -y redis # If this fails, add the --enablerepo="epel" flag 
sudo service redis start

For other platforms, please see Redis documentation.

This project assumes the usual port 6379 on your host. Check you now have redis installed and working.

redis-cli --version

you should see redis-cli 5.0.5 or similar

redis-cli PING

you should see PONG.

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NGINX

This is not strictly required, but recommended. NGINX can be used to protect your open/click tracking server. The example config file in this project uses the following Nginx features/modules:

• http-ssl
• http-v2
• headers-more

yum/EPEL/webtatic install on Amazon Linux

If you have access to the EPEL and Webtatic repos on your platform, you can use yum-based install to get Nginx with added modules. The following is for Amazon Linux 2 AMI. For other platforms, see NGINX documentation.

sudo yum update -y
sudo amazon-linux-extras install epel
wget http://repo.webtatic.com/yum/el7/x86_64/RPMS/webtatic-release-7-3.noarch.rpm
sudo rpm -Uvh webtatic-release-7-3.noarch.rpm
sudo yum --enablerepo=webtatic install nginx1w nginx1w-module-headers-more
sudo service nginx start
nginx -V

Depending on your EPEL release, you may need a different Webtatic version and/or nginx package name. For example, Amazon Linux 1 AMI:

wget http://repo.webtatic.com/yum/el6/x86_64/webtatic-release-6-9.noarch.rpm
sudo rpm -Uvh webtatic-release-6-9.noarch.rpm 
sudo yum --enablerepo=webtatic install nginx nginx-all-modules
sudo service nginx start
nginx -V

dhparam

As per the article referred to in the example .conf file, the .conf file expects DH params set up. You can create these with openssl and keep them in the usual place for certs. Needs sudo to write to this directory.

sudo openssl dhparam 2048 -out /etc/pki/tls/certs/dhparam.pem

Standard ports

If you wish to use standard ports (80, 443) for tracking:

• Check the main config file nginx.conf is not serving ordinary files by default on those ports.
• If it is, you may need to change or remove the existing server { .. } stanza.

Check the endpoint is active from another host, using curl as above, but using your external host address and port number.

Alternative to yum install: source-based install

The standard Nginx version available via yum does not have all needed features. You can build from source, providing you have gcc and git installed.

sudo yum install -y gcc git # pre-requisites

wget http://nginx.org/download/nginx-1.16.1.tar.gz
tar -xzvf nginx-1.16.1.tar.gz
wget https://github.com/openresty/headers-more-nginx-module/archive/v0.33.tar.gz
tar -xzvf v0.33.tar.gz
git clone https://github.com/openssl/openssl.git
cd openssl
git branch -a
# Choose the following as I found 1_1_1 gave problems
git checkout remotes/origin/OpenSSL_1_0_2-stable
cd ../nginx-1.16.1
./configure --prefix=/opt/nginx --with-http_ssl_module --with-openssl=../openssl --add-module=../headers-more-nginx-module-0.33  --with-http_v2_module
make
sudo make install

This places the freshly built code into /opt/nginx/.

Start, stop and reload config as follows:

# start
sudo /opt/nginx/sbin/nginx

# stop
sudo /opt/nginx/sbin/nginx -s stop

# reload config
sudo /opt/nginx/sbin/nginx -s reload

Ensure nginx starts on boot. There are various ways to do this, the simplest is to append a start command in the file /etc/rc.local.