Rails App for Weddings and Similar Events

So you're getting married 🎉

This is a simple rails app for distributing wedding information and managing the guest list. You will probably decide to build your own (like me…) but if you like you can start with this one. It's been through at least one wedding successfully!

Is it any good?

THIS WEBSITE IS AWESOME! Best wedding invite ever. — One of our guests

Features

Guests can RSVP, including dietary requirements and plus ones
Guests can manage their own RSVPs using a secret link in an email (no user name / password needed)
Responsive design on home page and RSVP pages
Customizable styling and wording
Active Admin interface to manage the attendee list
Optional invisible reCAPTCHA integration to avoid spam
Sets headers to avoid being indexed by search engines

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Rails App for Weddings and Similar Events

What does it look like?

How does it work?

Here's a map of all the flows through the app, from the home page to the RSVP flow and also some of the separate admin interface. Click here to expand the image. And here is a higher resolution PDF version.

Development

Initial Setup

The simplest way to get started is to use Docker.

git clone https://github.com/jdleesmiller/wedding.git
cd wedding
cp development.env.template development.env
docker-compose build
docker-compose up -d db
docker-compose run --rm web bash -lc 'bin/rails db:create db:migrate'
docker-compose run --rm web bash -lc 'bin/rails db:seed'

Watch the output of db:seed for the default admin credentials:

Admin user email: [email protected]
Admin user password: (random string)

Running the App

docker-compose up -d
docker-compose logs -f

By default, the app will run on http://localhost:3000

The admin interface is on http://localhost:3000/admin. Once you are logged into the admin, you can go to Admin Users, find the default admin user, and change its email address, if you like (you will need to re-enter the password).

To access the database:

docker-compose exec db psql wedding_development postgres

To get a shell:

docker-compose exec web bash

Once you have a shell in the container, you can run rails commands as normal.

bin/rails console
bin/rails test

Customization

You can of course customize everything by changing the code, but here are some useful places to start:

Content

config/locales/en.yml — key strings

wedding_name: "Jack & Jill's Wedding"
wedding_couple_names: 'Jack & Jill'
wedding_date: 'Saturday, 1 January 2000'
wedding_location: 'South Pole'
photo_credits: 'Photo Credits: Pexels'

app/views/application — the address on the home page and the addresses in the emails
app/views/welcome — the home page content
development.env — environment variables in development
- set emails and other secrets that should not be checked in
public/wedding.ics — the calendar invite
- this is just a sample file; you probably want to generate one

Styling

app/assets/images — the images
- jumbo.jpg is the title image at the top of the home page
- rsvp.jpg is the title image at the top of the RSVP pages

app/assets/stylesheets/application.scss — theme colors and bootstrap customization

$font-family-sans-serif: Montserrat, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;
$font-family-serif: Arvo, Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif;

$font-family-base: $font-family-serif;
$headings-font-family: $font-family-sans-serif;

$body-color: rgba(28, 13, 10, 0.7);
$headings-color: rgba(28, 13, 10, 0.7);

$theme-colors: (
  "primary": #ff745c
);

$enable-rounded: false;

Environment Variables

CANONICAL_URL — your website's domain, e.g. www.mywedding.com
CONTACT_EMAIL — the email address that users can use to contact you, e.g. [email protected]
FROM_EMAIL — the email address that confirmations emails will come from

Sending Email

There are environment variables that correspond to each smtp_settings key in the ActionMailer config.

SMTP_ADDRESS — name of the SMTP server
SMTP_PORT — port the SMTP server listens on (default 587)
SMTP_DOMAIN — HELO domain, if required
SMTP_USER_NAME — user name for SMTP server
SMTP_PASSWORD — password for SMTP server
SMTP_AUTHENTICATION — authentication type (default plain)
SMTP_ENABLE_STARTTLS_AUTO — automatically detect if STARTTLS is enabled and use it if so (default true)

ReCAPTCHA

If set, the website will use an invisible reCAPTCHA to prevent spam. You can get these from Google reCAPTCHA's admin page. Be sure to choose "Invisible" for the type.

RECAPTCHA_SITE_KEY — the data-sitekey for the Client side integration
RECAPTCHA_SECRET_KEY — the secret for the Server side integration

Deployment

Heroku makes it easy to deploy rails apps like this one. The free postgres database is enough, unless you have > 10k guests! You can set up a Heroku app and connect it to your GitHub repo.

You must set the canonical host and email addresses in order to be able to send email:

heroku config:set \
  CANONICAL_HOST=www.mywedding.com \
  CONTACT_EMAIL='Example Name <[email protected]>' \
  FROM_EMAIL='Example Name <[email protected]>'

You will also need to set up SMTP by setting the config variables above. One way to do this is to use your Google Mail account's SMTP server.

Then you can get up and running with:

heroku run rails db:migrate db:seed

Watch the output of db:seed for the default admin credentials, like in development. The admin console will be available on /admin.

If you like, you can also turn on reCAPTCHA, as above.

heroku config:set \
  RECAPTCHA_SITE_KEY=... \
  RECAPTCHA_SECRET_KEY=...

License

BSD License

Related Projects

I'm not the first rails developer to build a wedding website:

Credits

Thanks to @Hopet for help with design and copy.

Design

The default design is based on https://naomi-demo.squarespace.com/ .

Photos

The photos for the demo are from Pexels:

Cheap and reliable Node.js hosting starts at $3/month, and $1/month static HTML hosting

jdleesmiller / wedding

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