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fosspay Donate with fosspay

Donation collection for FOSS groups and individuals.

Rationale

Getting paid to write open source is hard. There are several problems with donations:

  • No job security
  • Not likely to be enough to switch to full time
  • Without being full time, it's hard to be productive

Some projects get support from companies, but most projects are not on the right scale for that to happen, and some projects (like most of my own) do not provide business value and wouldn't get sponsored regardless of size.

So, the solution: keep your job, and collect donations until you have raised enough to support one week of full time development on your open source projects. Take a week of unpaid leave and get some FOSS shit done.

fosspay

This software will collect donations for you. Want to take it for a test drive? Send me a buck.

  • Supports one-time and monthly donations
  • Process cards with Stripe - also supports Bitcoin
  • Flexible and customizable

It works for individuals (like me) and it works for organizations. Expect to spend about an hour or two setting up everything and then you're good to go.

Before you start

Do these things first:

  1. Research the tax implications for your country
  2. Speak with your employer about it

You will need a number of things set up before you start:

  1. An approved Stripe account
  2. A mail server (try Mandrill if you don't have one)
  3. A domain name and an SSL certificate (try Namecheap and StartSSL)
  4. A web server to host fosspay on (try Linode if you don't have one)

Installation

Install these things:

  • Python 3
  • pip (python 3)
  • PostgreSQL

You're responsible for setting up PostgreSQL yourself. Prepare a connection string for later.

Clone the git repository on the server that you want to host fosspay on:

git clone git://github.com/SirCmpwn/fosspay.git
cd fosspay

Install the Python packages:

sudo pip3 install -r requirements.txt

Compile the static assets:

make

Create a configuration file:

cp config.ini.example config.ini

Edit config.ini to your liking. Then, you can run the following to start up the development server:

python3 app.py

Log into http://your-domain:5000, and you will receive further instructions.

Deployment

Once you have everything configured, you will need to switch from the dev server into something more permanent. Install gunicorn on your server and use the systemd unit provided in contrib/. You will also probably want to run this through nginx instead of directly exposing gunicorn to the web, see contrib/nginx.conf. Neither the nginx configuration or the systemd unit are immediately ready to use - read them and change them to suit your needs.

Using nginx or something like it is necessary for SSL support, and you must serve your site with https for Stripe to work.