Overview

In a nutshell, hugo-mx-gateway provides a RESTful POST endpoint for static contact/demo request pages. It's a simple, yet a powerful tool for this only-designed purpose.

Table of contents

• Overview
• Table of contents
• Why hugo-mx-gateway
  • How it Works
  • Prerequisites
• Deployment
  • Deployment on Google Appp Engine
  • Deployment on a Kubernetes cluster
  • Deployment on Docker
• Create a Contact/Demo Request Form for Hugo
• Configuration variables
• License & Copyrights
• Support & Contributions

Why hugo-mx-gateway

Did you ever experience building a static website (e.g. using Hugo or whatever alternative), then did get stuck when coming the time to add a contact/demo request form?

You're at the right place.

This project, namely hugo-mx-gateway, is meant to provide a RESTful endpoint that adds the dynamicity required to handle contact/demo requests for static web sites. It's a simple, yet a powerful tool for this only-designated purpose.

How it Works

hugo-mx-gateway is built upon a simple request handling workflow:

• Create an HTML form with a POST action pointing towards the hugo-mx-gateway service. This service is a RESTful HTTP POST endpoint backed by an application easily deployable on Google App Engine, Kubernetes, and Docker engines.
• For each form request, hugo-mx-gateway retrieves information submitted by the user (email, subject, message details...), then it automatically generates and sends a templated email towards the user-provided email address, while bccing a copy of that email to an address that you do define for internal tracking and follow up.
• Once a request is processed (upon success or failure), hugo-mx-gateway copes with the reply towards the origin web site (static page) by redirecting the browser to the originated page with additional URL parameters describing the status of the processing (e.g. /contact.html?status=success&message=request%20submitted). With this, you can then add a few lines of Javascript to retrieve and display the reply message on the page.
• hugo-mx-gateway is shipped with a sample HTML form including some common fields for contact and demo requests, as well as a sample Javascript code to handle the processing response. That said, this is a open source software, so you're free to adapt it for your specific use cases.

Prerequisites

hugo-mx-gateway is deployable in minutes, subject to fillful the following requirements:

• Deployment platform: Google App Engine, a Kubernetes cluster, or a Docker machine.
• An SMTP account along with the server supporting TLS. While it can be tempting to use a personal account, it's highly recommended to not do that for an internet-hosted service. Therefore, according to your situation, you may need to ask for an SMTP account to your corporate's IT staff. If you're an individual or a small business, you can opt for a cloud-based SMTP service like SendGrid, Mailgun, and Mailjet--they all offer free tier for small usage.

Deployment

hugo-mx-gateway is deployable in minutes on the following platforms:

• Google Appp Engine
• Kubernetes
• Docker

Deployment on Google Appp Engine

This requires to have an active GCP account.

• Make sure to have Google Cloud SDK (gcloud) installed on your work station.
• Create/select a GCP project to deploy hugo-mx-gateway. Note that each GCP project can hold only a single App Engine instance.
• Create the Google App Engine configuration file

  cp app.yaml.sample app.yaml
  

• Open the app.yaml file with your favorite editor.
• Set the configuration variables as described here.
• Apply the deployment as follows:

  make deploy-gcp
  

• Check that hugo-mx-gateway is up and functioning

  curl https://PROJECT-ID.REGION.r.appspot.com/healthz 
  

  Replace PROJECT-ID with the GCP project ID, and REGION with the deployment region.

Deployment on a Kubernetes cluster

There is a Helm chart to ease the deployment on Kubernetes clusters. This chart has been validated with Helm 3.

• Note that the hugo-mx-gateway's pod is run in an unprivileged mode with a Security Context.

• First check the Helm's values.yaml file to set configuration options appropriately.

• Choose the deployment namespace. In the deployment commands hereafter, it's assumed that the target namespace is hugo-mx-gateway. If you opt for another namespace, do consider to adapt the commands accordingly.

• Deployment with Helm (validated with Helm 3)

  helm upgrade \
    --namespace hugo-mx-gateway \
    --install hugo-mx-gateway \
    helm/
  

• Installation using Kubectl (if not using Helm). The Helm client is required to generate a raw template for kubectl.

  $ helm template \
      hugo-mx-gateway \
      --namespace hugo-mx-gateway \
      helm/ | \
      kubectl apply -f -
  

• Check that the Service is up and running.

  kubectl -nhugo-mx-gateway port-forward service/hugo-mx-gateway 8080:80
  curl https://127.0.0.1:8080/healthz 
  

Deployment on Docker

hugo-mx-gateway is released as a Docker image, so you can quickly start an instance in any machine running Docker.

An instance can be started with the next command; please consider to adapt the configuration variables appropriately.

$ docker run -d \
   --publish 8080:8080 \
   --name '`hugo-mx-gateway`' \
   -e SMTP_SERVER_ADDR="smtp.example.com:465" \
   -e SMTP_VERITY_CERT=true \
   -e SMTP_CLIENT_USERNAME="postmaster@example.com" \
   -e SMTP_CLIENT_PASSWORD="postmasterSecretPassWord" \
   -e CONTACT_REPLY_EMAIL="noreply@example.com" \
   -e CONTACT_REPLY_BCC_EMAIL="contact@example.com" \
   -e DEMO_URL="https://demo.example.com/" \
   -e ALLOWED_ORIGINS="127.0.0.1,example.com" \
   rchakode/`hugo-mx-gateway`

Check that hugo-mx-gateway is up and functionning.

curl https://127.0.0.1:8080/healthz 

Create a Contact/Demo Request Form for Hugo

The file ./samples/hugo-partial-contact-form.html contains a sample HTML form for Hugo. It can be used for both contact and demo requests.

Open the file in a your favorite editor and review it.

Notice that the form is configured to be rendered specifically according to a Hugo parameter named tags, which is actually a list of tags. If the parameter holds a tag named contact then, the form will be rendered as a contact form. Otherwise, it'll be rendered as a demo form.

The integration works as follows:

• Copy the HTML form content in your target Hugo HTML template.
• Modify the HTML tag to make the action point to the URL of the sendmail backend deployed previously.
  • On Google App Engine, the endpoint shall be: https://PROJECT-ID.REGION.r.appspot.com/sendmail. Replace PROJECT-ID and REGION, repectively, with the GCP's project ID and the deployment region.
  • On Kubernetes, the in-cluster endpoint shall be: http://hugo-mx-gateway.hugo-mx-gateway.svc.cluster.local/sendmail
  • On Docker, the endpoint shall be: http://DOCKER-HOST:8080/sendmail. Replace DOCKER-HOST with the IP adress or the hostname of the Docker machine.
• Edit the Hugo Markdown content of the target contact/demo page to ensure that the tags parameter holds a appropriate value (i.e. contact for a contact form, or demo for a demo request form).

Here is an example of header for a Hugo Markdown page. Since the tags parameter holds a tag named contact), the page will be rendered as a contact request form.

---
title: "Contact Us"
description: "Contact request page"
date: 2020-04-25T00:20:27+02:00
tags: [contact]
---

Configuration variables

According to the deployment platform (Google App Engine, Kubernetes, Docker), the following configuration parameters must be provided as environment variables:

• SMTP_SERVER_ADDR: Set the address of the SMTP server in the form of host:port. It's required that the SMTP server being supporting TLS.
• SMTP_VERITY_CERT: Tell whether the SMTP certificate should be validated against top level authorities. If you're using a self-signed certificate on the SMTP server, this value must be set to false.
• SMTP_CLIENT_USERNAME: Set the username to connect to the SMTP server.
• SMTP_CLIENT_PASSWORD: Set the password to connect to the SMTP server.
• CONTACT_REPLY_EMAIL: Set an email address for the reply email. It's not necessary a valid email address, for example if don't want the user to reply you can use something like noreply@example.com.
• CONTACT_REPLY_BCC_EMAIL: Sets an email address for bcc copy of the email sent to the user. This is useful for tracking and follow up.
• DEMO_URL: Specific for demo forms, it can be used to set the URL of the demo site that will be included to the user reply email (e.g. https://demo.example.com/).
• ALLOWED_ORIGINS: Set a list of comma-separated domains that the hugo-mx-gateway App shoudl trust. This is for security reason to filter requests. Only requests with an Origin header belonging to the defined origins will be accepted, through it's only required that the request has a valid Referer header. It's expected in the future to these request filtering and admission rules.
• TEMPLATE_DEMO_REQUEST_REPLY (optional): Specify the path of the template to reply a demo request. The default templare is templates/template_reply_demo_request.html
• TEMPLATE_CONTACT_REQUEST_REPLY (optional): Specify the path of the template to reply a contact request. The default templare is templates/template_reply_contact_request.html.

License & Copyrights

This tool (code and documentation) is licensed under the terms of Apache 2.0 License. Read the LICENSE file for more details on the license terms.

The tool may inlcude third-party libraries provided with their owns licenses and copyrights, but always compatible with the Apache 2.0 License terms of use.

Support & Contributions

We encourage feedback and do make our best to handle any troubles you may encounter when using this tool.

Here is the link to submit issues: https://github.com/rchakode/hugo-mx-gateway/issues.

New ideas are welcomed, please open an issue to submit your idea if you have any one.

Contributions are accepted subject that the code and documentation be released under the terms of Apache 2.0 License.

To contribute bug patches or new features, please use the Github Pull Request model.