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Little Post

Little Post is an email-to-print service for BERG's Little Printer. It allows you to set up an email address that will auto-print any message it receives.

For more about why this exists, see the blog post.

Setup

The setup is pretty simple, but there are a few moving parts to put in place. These instructions describe setting up on Heroku, but of course you could host it anywhere.

0. You will need

  1. Ruby (tested on 1.9.3)
  2. Heroku (if you're installing with these instructions)
  3. About 20 minutes

1. Get the repo and gems

$ git clone git://github.com/bsaf/little-post.git
$ cd little-post
$ gem install bundler
$ bundle install

2. Create a Heroku app

You'll need to have a Heroku account and to have Heroku installed. Once you've done this, create the server that will push emails to the printer.

$ heroku create -s cedar YOUR_APP_NAME # e.g. basil-post
$ git push heroku master

If you run heroku open you should see the app, with a message to set up your environment variables.

3. Set the environment variables

The server is protected with basic auth. You'll need to set a username and password first. To do this, run the following commands, substituting the XXX with the values you want.

$ heroku config:set DASHBOARD_USERNAME=XXX
$ heroku config:set DASHBOARD_PASSWORD=XXX

You also need to provide the app with your Little Printer direct print code which you can get here. Set it with the following command:

$ heroku config:set LP_DIRECT_PRINT_CODE=XXX

4. Sign up to Mailgun

Mailgun is going to take our emails and forward them on to this app. They have a free plan which gives you 200 emails a day, which should be more than plenty.

Sign up here.

5. Set up a route

Almost there. The final step is to set up a route in Mailgun. A route is a 'rule' that matches incoming mail against a filter and carries out an action against that mail. On your Mailgun dashboard:

  • Click 'Routes'
  • Click 'Create a new route'
  • For the filter expression, enter catch_all()
  • For actions, enter:
forward("http://DASHBOARD_USERNAME:DASHBOARD_PASSWORD@YOUR_APP_NAME.herokuapp.com/letterbox")

Double check that last one. You need to replace your username and password, and the Heroku URL.

5. Try it!

Done! Now send an email to anything@YOUR_MAILGUN_USERNAME.mailgun.org and wait for the printer to start blinking.

Making it nicer

Set up a 'nice' email address

To make it a bit nicer, you can set up a filter on your normal email address to forward certain emails to your Mailgun address.

For example, if your email address is [email protected] you can filter emails sent to [email protected] to forward to your Mailgun address. This will be easier for you and your friends to remember than the Mailgun address.

Running the app locally

If you want to run the app locally, rename the env-example to .env and fill in the values in the file.

To start the server locally, run:

$ RACK_ENV=development bundle exec foreman start