Simple Contact

Technology agnostic contact forms. One code base for all of your contact forms.

Why?

The concept behind this project is to churn out simple, secure and easily customizable contact forms in any web application. I am platform agnostic when it comes to my development and I got sick of learning new contact form plugins or copy/pasting my custom vue.js app.

What is it?

This code base has two distinct applications.

1. A configurable mailgun proxy
2. Vue.js based form generator

Up and running in minutes

The most straightforward way to test this code base out would be to use docker / docker-compose. You must have a mailgun account ready to send email. Currently, you must also have a registered domain name. This could be customized to send emails w/o one but that's not on the table for me right now.

1. Clone git clone git@github.com:derek-adair/flask-mailgun-proxy.git
2. Add MG_KEY=your-mailgun-key to a .env file or export as an environment variable
3. Configure ./api/proxy.configy.yml (look @ the example)
4. docker-compose up
5. Send some test emails from localhost:8777

Easy to Customize

Most users will spend their time editing ./api/proxy.config.yml and editing the formSchema in ./form-generator/Contact.vue, however, the sky is the limit here (e.g. add analytics by customizing ./api/app.py).

The Server

1. proxy.config.yml The flask proxy will read the following;

domains:
    # Your mailgun domain
    mg.<yourdomain>.com: 
        to: <your_valid_email>
        uris:
            - https://<yourdomain>.com

Any requests from yourdomain.com with valid json will be processed and submitted to mailgun.

json request

{
    "text": "Message submitted to mailgun",
    "from": "usersubmitted@email.com"
}

NOTE: the from field is optional. If a "from" email isn't submitted it will default to postmaster@<yourdomain>.com

The Form Generator

This code base was scaffolded w/ the npm create vue@latest and installed w/ yarn. You can read more about what this code means here.

Basic customization

All you need to grok to leverage this project is the field structure;

• It requires label, name, and as.
• The rules is how you validate. Yup comes installed but you can use validation rules you want.
• Any additional properties will be rendered as field properties (e.g. type='password' will make it a password field)

Easy to build

docker-compose run --rm form-generator yarn build

Details

The heart of this generator is the DynamicForm component. This is where you can see that this generator uses VeeValidate and is just a copy of their form generator tutorial with an axios call that parses the form.

Advanced Customization

to roll out multiple forms in one project...

1. Root Component: create a new copy of ./form-generator/src/Contact.vue named NewContactor create a copy. Any form you make will need to have it's own root vue component definition. Edit the fields to fit your needs.
2. Register Form:

./form-generator/src/main.js

import NewForm from "./NewForm.vue";
createApp(NewForm).mount("#newForm");

./form-generator/src/index.html Add the vue contianer somewhere

<div id="newForm"></div>

3. Point your forms by editin DynamicForm's template action (defaults to the docker-compose localhost)

<Form v-else  @submit="onSubmit" action="{YOUR_PRODUCTION_URI}">

4. Build your forms:

docker-compose run --rm form-generator yarn run build

Then you can embed the files generated in ./form-generator/src/dist.

NOTE: This will be owned by your docker user, you may need to edit permissions.

Build tools

I prefer to develop against docker images using docker-compose. It's a little awkward at first but anyone with knowledge of docker can quite easily mimic my development workflow precisely with several commands.

Useful Commands

• Connect to running container with docker exec; docker exec -it flask-email-proxy_ui_1 bash -il.
• Spin up a disposable container docker-compose run --rm --service-ports ui