composer.json

{
    "require": {
        "php": ">=5.5.0",
        "ext-gettext": "*"
    }
}

Sendy.md

Sendy

Sendy is a self hosted email newsletter application that lets you send trackable emails via Amazon Simple Email Service (SES).

Heroku

You can deploy Sendy on Heroku using the following instructions (I assume you've already installed the heroku toolbelt).

1. On Heroku, create a new app.
2. Clone that app to your desktop git clone git@heroku.com:YOURAPP.git -o heroku
3. Add the free cleardb addon to your project heroku addons:add cleardb
4. Add the included composer.json file to the root of your cloned directory.
5. Customise the includes/config.php and include the following snippet to use the ClearDB addon previously selected on Heroku:

   <?php
   define('APP_PATH', 'http://yourdomain.com');

   $url_cleardb = parse_url(getenv("CLEARDB_DATABASE_URL"));

   /*  MySQL database connection credentials  */
   $dbHost = $url_cleardb['host']; //MySQL Hostname
   $dbUser = $url_cleardb['user']; //MySQL Username
   $dbPass = $url_cleardb['pass']; //MySQL Password
   $dbName = substr($url_cleardb["path"],1); //MySQL Database Name

All these settings are necessary to Heroku to automatically hook up the ClearDB add-on. More on the settings here.

6. Commit all the changes and push to Heroku:

   git add -A .
   git commit -am "Sendy customised for heroku deployment"
   git push heroku master

7. Follow the remaining Sendy setup steps (http://sendy.co/get-started) starting with Step 5.

Seting up Cron

Cron will make your experience much nicer, and not lock up your site.

1. Add the heroku scheduler: heroku addons:add scheduler:standard
2. Open the scheduler: heroku addons:open scheduler
3. Create two jobs, each with a frequency of 10 mins, and 1x dyno

• Task 1: php autoresponders.php > /dev/null 2>&1
• Task 2: php scheduled.php > /dev/null 2>&1

FAQs

You can add your own domain/subdomain easily: heroku domains:add YOUR.DOMAIN.COM Then go to your Domain Registrant and add a CNAME with the value of your app:

Record	Name	Target
CNAME	YOUR	YOUR-APP.herokuapp.com.

Replacing of course the name to match the subdomain of your choosing, and appending to your domain record.

Need help with my deployment. Works fine on Heroku. However, when I schedule a campaign, the scheduler runs and sends to zero recipients. What could be the problem?

Installs ok, but there can be some unforseen issues.

• Importing email list by CSV doesn't work until you add this to composer.json

    "scripts": {
        "compile": [
          "mkdir -p -m 777 uploads/csvs/"
        ]
    }

• ClearDB is limited to a maximum of 3600 queries per hour. If you go over this limit, for example by importing a long email list, the database will stop responding for an hour, giving the site the appearance of being broken.
• Cron jobs run every 10 minutes don't work, so that breaks a lot of functionality.

Thanks a lot for this. I got an initial install on Heroku with this guide. But it turns out that Heroku has problems with regard to the ephemeral filesystem and permissions for the /uploads folder. Reading more posts from the Sendy community, I finally went with DigitalOcean as the host.

I fully documented my install process here: https://medium.com/@alexjacobs/installing-sendy-as-a-replacement-for-mailchimp-2019-update-the-complete-guide-with-automated-5a59c4bd7249

It includes enabling https / making daily mysql backups / archiving the mysql backups in an AWS S3 bucket.