Papercups

Papercups is an open source live customer chat web app. We offer a hosted version at app.papercups.io.

You can check out how our chat widget looks and play around with customizing it on our demo page. The chat widget component is also open sourced at github.com/papercups-io/chat-widget.

Watch how easy it is to get set up with our Slack integration 🚀 :

One click Heroku deployment

Philosophy

We wanted to make a self-hosted version of tools like Intercom and Drift for companies that have privacy and security concerns about having customer data going to third party services. We’re starting with chat right now but we want to expand into all forms of customer communication like email campaigns and push notifications.

Stay tuned! We'll be posting a more detailed roadmap soon 🤓

Getting started

Papercups runs on Elixir/Phoenix, with a TypeScript React app for the frontend.

If you haven't installed Elixir, Phoenix, NodeJS, and PostgresQL yet, you can find some great instructions here: https://hexdocs.pm/phoenix/installation.html

tl;dr:

Install Elixir: https://elixir-lang.org/install.html
Install Hex:

mix local.hex

To check that we are on Elixir 1.6 and Erlang 20 or later, run:

elixir -v
Erlang/OTP 20 [erts-9.3] [source] [64-bit] [smp:8:8] [async-threads:10] [hipe] [kernel-poll:false] [dtrace]

Elixir 1.6.3

Install the Phoenix application generator:

mix archive.install hex phx_new 1.5.4

Install NodeJS: https://nodejs.org/en/download/
Install PostgresQL: https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Detailed_installation_guides

Cloning the repo

git clone git@github.com:papercups-io/papercups.git
cd papercups

To start your server

Install backend dependencies with mix deps.get
Install frontend dependencies with cd assets && npm install
Create and migrate your database with mix ecto.setup
Start the server with mix phx.server

This will automatically start up the React frontend in watch mode on localhost:3000, with the API running on localhost:4000.

To start client side

The frontend code will start up automatically when you run mix phx.server, but for more information see: assets/README.md

Developing on Docker

You can edit your local code when developing with docker and it will update in the container.

The docker file is made for development only at the moment

docker build -t papercups . && docker-compose up

Running tests

Create a PostgreSQL test database named: chat_api_test, and run:

mix test

Get in touch

Come say hi to us on Slack or Discord! 👋

Appendix

(We'll add more instructions here as we implement more integrations.)

Setting up email alerts

Set the environment variables in the .env.example file.

At the moment we only support Mailgun — other messaging channels are coming soon!

Deploying

We currently use Heroku for deployments:

git push heroku master
heroku run "POOL_SIZE=2 mix ecto.migrate"

Running compiler on file change

Note: Make sure you are running this inside of ChatApi otherwise it'll trigger on UI changes

./scripts/compile_watch.sh

Learn more about Phoenix

Official website: https://www.phoenixframework.org/
Guides: https://hexdocs.pm/phoenix/overview.html
Docs: https://hexdocs.pm/phoenix
Forum: https://elixirforum.com/c/phoenix-forum
Source: https://github.com/phoenixframework/phoenix

exexzian / papercups