Fosspay

Fosspay is a free-software web frontend for receiving donations and subscriptions, similar to Patreon or Liberapay, but which can be hosted on your own server. It can also interface with Patreon or Github Sponsors to aggregate all your donations.

Stripe Setup

Fosspay uses Stripe as a payment processor. You first must go to their website and create an account.

Once you set everything up, you can go to https://dashboard.stripe.com/account/apikeys and get your “Publishable Key” and “Secret Key” which will be all you need to set up Fosspay.

Dependencies

We will need git, postgres and the ability to make a python virtual environment:

apt install git python3-venv python3-dev postgresql libpq-dev

Download and Installation

We will download fosspay to /var/www/fosspay/. This directory will also serve as our virtual environement.

git clone https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/fosspay /var/www/fosspay
python3 -m venv /var/www/fosspay

Activate the python environment with the command below, then we will install the dependencies.

source /var/www/fosspay/bin/activate
cd /var/www/fosspay
pip install -r requirements.txt

Be sure you are still in /var/www/fosspay, then we will build the package and create the configuration file.

make
cp config.ini.example config.ini

Create a Database

Fosspay uses a PostgreSQL database to store donation information, so let's create a database and user for it.

First, become the postgres user and run the psql command:

su postgres
psql

We will create a database named fosspay controled by a user named fosspay (also identified by a a password fosspay).

create database fosspay ;
create user fosspay with encrypted password 'fosspay' ;
grant all privileges on database fosspay to fosspay ;
\q

Note that if you want to use a different username or password for whatever reason, change them in the command above, but also in the connection-string variable in the configuration file.

Configuration

Now open up /var/www/fosspay/config.ini and we will set things up. Here are a list of things to edit.

• domain should be set to donate.example.org, with your domain.
• protocol can be set to https.
• Get or create an email account to use as a mailer and add the account/server information to the email settings.
• Add your public and secret Stripe keys to the information.
• Change the connection-string to postgresql://fosspay:fosspay@localhost/fosspay as set up above.

An important note: mail ports must be opened on the server you're using, or else Fosspay will silently fail to send mails when someone tries to donate or reset their password. You do not have to run a mail server on the same server as Fosspay, but either way, mail submission ports must be opened. This usually requires contacting your VPS provider and requesting it from them. Aside from this, any error in the email setup will cause Fosspay to crash silently.

Optional Integration with Patreon, Github, Liberapay

Note that if you have a previous Patreon, Github Sponsors or Liberapay account, you can create an access token for Fosspay, so that you can display your income from those sources along side Fosspay monthly donations.

For Liberapay, you only need to include your username. You must create a Github access token with the "user" access to interface with it, and you have to add several Patreon client parameters for it.

Nginx configuration

Fosspay runs on port 5000, so we can have Nginx show the site. Create an Nginx configuration file modeled as below:

server {
        listen 80 ;
        listen [::]:80 ;
        server_name donate.example.org ;
        location / {
                proxy_pass http://localhost:5000 ;
        }
}

After that, remember to get HTTPS for the subdomain! HTTPS is absolutely required for using Stripe as a payment processor.

Systemd File

We can now create a systemd service file for Fosspay. Create a file in /etc/systemd/system/fosspay.service as below:

[Unit]
Description=fosspay website
Wants=network.target
Wants=postgresql.target
Before=network.target
Before=postgresql.target
[Service]
Type=simple
WorkingDirectory=/var/www/fosspay
VIRTUAL_ENV=/var/www/fosspay
Environment=PATH=$VIRTUAL_ENV/bin:$PATH
ExecStart=/var/www/fosspay/bin/gunicorn app:app -b 127.0.0.1:5000
ExecStop=/var/www/fosspay/bin/gunicorn
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Note that for safety, we are running fosspay through gunicorn in our virtual environment.

We can now run systemctl start fosspay to start the service, and it should appear at the URL you designated above.

Customizing the Page

Within /var/www/fosspay/templates, there are various files that you can change to add text and other features to the page. The main file is summary.html, where you can add a description and other information that will appear. Restart the service after updating files to make changes live.