This is Gittip, a platform for personal funding.

Gittip is a cooperative escrow agent for recurring micro-gifts, or gift tips. Possible tip amounts per week are 0.00, 0.25, 3.00, 6.00, 12.00, and 24.00.

Friday is payday. On Friday, we charge people's credit cards and the money goes into Gittip's (Zeta Design & Development, LLC's) bank account. Money is allocated to other participants according to tips. Participants may withdraw money at any time, though this is currently quite manual.

The site is built with Python 2.7 and the Aspen web framework, and is hosted on Heroku. Balanced is used for credit card processing, and Google for analytics.

You need python2.7 on your PATH.

You need Postgres with headers installed. There's a simple Makefile for building the software. All Python dependencies are included in vendor/. To make run you need a local.env file in the distribution root with these keys:

CANONICAL_HOST=
CANONICAL_SCHEME=http
DATABASE_URL=postgres://gittip@localhost/gittip
BALANCED_API_SECRET=90bb3648ca0a11e1a977026ba7e239a9
GITHUB_CLIENT_ID=3785a9ac30df99feeef5
GITHUB_CLIENT_SECRET=e69825fafa163a0b0b6d2424c107a49333d46985
GITHUB_CALLBACK=http://localhost:8537/github/associate
DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH=/Library/PostgreSQL/9.1/lib

The BALANCED_API_SECRET is a test marketplace. To generate a new secret for your own testing run this command:

curl -X POST https://api.balancedpayments.com/v1/api_keys | grep secret

Grab that secret and also create a new marketplace to test against:

curl -X POST https://api.balancedpayments.com/v1/marketplaces -u <your_secret>:

The site works without this, except for the credit card page. Visit the Balanced Documentation if you want to know more about creating marketplaces.

The GITHUB_* keys are for a gittip-dev application in the Gittip organization on Github. It points back to localhost:8537, which is where Gittip will be running if you start it locally with make run.

The DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH thing is to get psycopg2 working on Mac OS with EnterpriseDB's Postgres 9.1 installer.

Install PostgreSQL. The best version to use is 9.1, because Gittip uses the hstore extension for unstructured data, and that isn't bundled with earlier versions. If you're on a Mac, maybe try out Heroku's Postgres.app:

http://postgresapp.com/

Add a "role" (Postgres user) that matches your OS username. Make sure it's a superuser role and has login privileges. Here's a sample invocation of the createuser executable that comes with Postgres that will do this for you, assuming that a "postgres" superuser was already created as part of initial installation:

$ createuser --username postgres --superuser $USER 

It's also convenient to set the authentication method to "trust" in pg_hba.conf for local connections, so you don't have to enter a password all the time. Reload Postgres using pg_ctl for this to take effect.

Once Postgres is set up, run:

$ ./makedb.sh

That will create a new gittip superuser and a gittip database (with UTC as the default timezone), populated with structure from ./schema.sql. To change the name of the database and/or user, pass them on the command line:

$ ./makedb.sh mygittip myuser

If you only pass one argument it will be used for both dbname and owner role:

$ ./makedb.sh gittip-test

The schema for the Gittip.com database is defined in schema.sql. It should be considered append-only. The idea is that this is the log of DDL that we've run against the production database. You should never change commands that have already been run. New DDL will be (manually) run against the production database as part of deployment.

Please write unit tests for all new code and all code you change. Gittip's test suite is designed for the nosetests test runner. Assuming you have make, the easiest way to run the test suite is:

$ make test

To invoke nosetests directly you need to set DATABASE_URL in its environment, like so:

[gittip] $ DATABASE_URL=postgres://gittip@localhost/gittip nosetests

• http://www.kickstarter.com/
• http://flattr.com/
• http://tiptheweb.org/
• http://www.indiegogo.com/
• http://www.pledgemusic.com/
• https://propster.me/
• http://kachingle.com/
• https://venmo.com/
• https://www.snoball.com/
• http://pledgie.com/
• http://www.humblebundle.com/
• https://www.crowdtilt.com/
• http://www1.networkforgood.org/
• http://anyfu.com/
• http://videovivoapp.com/