This is a tool developed by the Shorenstein Center at the Harvard Kennedy School to import MailChimp email list data, analyze it, and output the resulting metrics in an email report.

These instructions will get you a copy of the project up and running on your local machine for development and testing purposes. See deployment for notes on how to deploy the project on a live system.

You will need Python >=3.6, RabbitMQ, and Celery. Celery Beat is optional but recommended for production use. You will also need a relational database to connect to the application.

Create a new virtual environment:

virtualenv email-benchmarks
source email-benchmarks/bin/activate

Install requirements:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Modify config.py, paying particular attention to the SQLALCHEMY_DATABASE_URI, SERVER_NAME, and all of the Flask-Mail configuration variables. Note that while SERVER_NAME can be excluded (or set to localhost), Flask-Mail will fail to generate a url adapter and the application will crash when it attempts to send an email.

We use proxies to distribute our MailChimp requests across IP addresses. You will need to modify the import_list_async function in app/lists.py or remove the proxy functionality.

Upgrade the database:

export FLASK_APP=app.py
flask db upgrade

Run the application:

flask run

Separately, run the Celery worker:

celery worker -A app.celery --loglevel=INFO

Finally, open a web browser and navigate to the SERVER_NAME URI.

You will need node.js and npm installed. Then run:

npm install

To build and watch the frontend source files, run:

gulp

The .eslintrc file defines Javascript rules.

This app is environment-agnostic. We deployed it on Ubuntu using gunicorn and nginx, and daemonized Celery and Celery Beat. Here are a few pointers on what we did.

A sample init script for gunicorn:

[Unit]
Description=Gunicorn instance to serve app
After=network.target

[Service]
User=app_user
Group=www-data
WorkingDirectory=/path/to/app
Environment="PATH=/path/to/app/email-benchmarks/bin"
ExecStart=/path/to/app/email-benchmarks/bin/gunicorn --workers 5 --bind unix:email-benchmarks.sock -m 007 app:app

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

A sample init script for nginx:

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name SERVER_NAME;

    location / {
        include proxy_params;
        proxy_pass http://unix:/path/to/app/email-benchmarks.sock;
    }
}

Sample init scripts for Celery can be found in the Celery repo.

• William Hakim - William Hakim

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details