Static Site Contact Form

Basically, what it says on the tin. I've got a statically generated site, but I also want a contact form on it, so what's a person to do? Well, one option is to post the form to a small non-static site to deliver the form submission by email. This app will do that.

How it Works

Once deployed, point a form on your static site to the address you've deployed this app. Any form data submitted to this app will be emailed to the email address you configure. The person submitting the form will get redirected back to your site (where exactly they end up after submitting will be configurable).

<!-- put a form like this on your site -->
<form method="post" action="http://contact.example.com">
  <label for="name">Name</label>
  <input type="text" name="name" id="name">

  <label for="body">Message</label>
  <textarea name="body" id="body"></textarea>

  <input type="submit" value="Send">
</form>

Deploying

Built to be deployed to Heroku, and the documentation that follows reflects this, but you can do whatever you want. For information about deploying an app to Heroku, check out their docs.

Configuring

Delivery

You must configure a delivery mechanism. Current supported options are Heroku's built-in Sendgrid add-on or your own SMTP server.

SMTP (Preferred)

Set the DELIVERY_SERVER environment variable with a valid SMTP URI:

heroku config:set DELIVERY_SERVER=smtp://username:[email protected]

Sendgrid (Alternate)

If you don't have an SMTP server to use, you can spin up a free Sendgrid account (for low volumes) with Heroku. Heroku will provide the correct environment variables for this app to deliver through Sendgrid

heroku addons:add sendgrid:starter

Once you've completed this, log into Heroku's web interface and click into the Sendgrid add-on, since there's few steps they ask you to complete (making choices on some settings, and so on) before delivering email.

Recipient

You must configure a recipient email address with the RECIPIENT environment variable.

heroku config:set [email protected]

Sender

You can optionally specify the email address that these emails come from with the SENDER environment variable. If not configured, defaults to the recipient email address.

heroku config:set [email protected]

Redirect

You can optionally specify a URL (thank-you page, perhaps) to redirect the visitor back to once the email is delivered. If you don't specify this, they'll get redirected back to the page they came from.

heroku config:set REDIRECT=http://example.com/thankyou

TODOs

• Robust test suite
• JS endpoint to return some JSON upon success, to be handled by the sending page?
• Some type of CSRF protection?