Selfstarter

Note

This is a fork of the Selfstarter project from Lockitron. The original project uses Amazon Felxible Payments, while this implementation uses Stripe for payments. The README is adapted from the original repository.

About

Selfstarter makes it easy to roll your own crowdfunding site. To get started, fork this repository and change around config/settings.yml to suit your needs.

See it in action

Background

After a rejection from Kickstarter, we decided to follow in the footsteps of App.net and make our own crowdfunding site for Lockitron. We've been absolutely blown away by the response. As a first step in what will hopefully be a long history of giving back, we have decided to open source the crowdfunding platform that got us here. Please send questions, comments, or concerns to [email protected]!

Selfstarter is a starting point. We made some specific choices with Selfstarter for Lockitron and we recommend you tailor it for your project:

• This implementation of Selfstarter uses Stripe for payments. You can use Amazon Payments (per the original project or WePay. We used Stripe's stripe-ruby gem.
• We collect a Customer object using the Stripe API - this lets us collect payment information without charging the customer until we are ready to ship.
• Selfstarter doesn't come with any authentication, administration, mailers or analytics tools. We recommend adding a basic set of these so that you can message backers and manage orders.

Getting Started

Note: This assumes you have Ruby 1.9.2 or later installed properly and have a basic working knowledge of how to use RubyGems

First you'll need to fork and clone this repo

git clone https://github.com/siddarth/selfstarter-stripe.git

Let's get all our dependencies setup:

bundle install --without production

Now let's create the database:

rake db:migrate

Let's get it running:

rails s

Customizing

While it is just a skeleton, we did make it a little quicker to change around things like your product name, the colors, pricing, etc.

To change around the product name, tweet text, and more, open this file:

config/settings.yml

To change around the colors and fonts, open this file:

app/assets/stylesheets/variables.css.scss

To dive into the code, open this file:

app/controllers/preorder_controller.rb

Deploying to Production

We recommend using Heroku, and we even include a Procfile for you. All you need to do is run:

gem install heroku
heroku create
git push heroku master
heroku run rake db:migrate