Owner FAQs

Owner Frequently Asked Questions

Pre-setup

Who should use Chapter?

_Chapter_ is a self-hosted event registration platform for organizations with local chapters.

See the Vision Statement and README for more on the purpose and intended audience.

What is the terminology used by Chapter, e.g. instance, chapter, organization?

The vocabulary used for the project is described in the [Terminology section of the project's overview page].(https://github.com/freeCodeCamp/chapter#terminology).

Are there any dependencies or 3rd party services involved?

• Email: Organizations may relay transaction emails originating from the instance through a remote SMTP server, including:
  • your organization's existing SMTP relaying services
  • 3rd party service (ex. Amazon SES, Mailgun, Mailjet, Sendgrid, Postmark, Mandrill, etc).
  • Though, it may be possible, localhost email relaying is not suggested or supported.
• User-generated files/uploads: may require a 3rd-party S3-compatible storage service. Instances which are self-hosting with a locally mounted read-write file system can opt for local file storage.

How much will it cost?

The _Chapter_ application is free, but there will likely be some cost to run / host the application.

Organizations may be able to leverage existing hosting services for little or no extra cost. Otherwise, organizations can expect fees from $5-25 USD per month.

Keep in mind, any fees would be for running an entire self-hosted _Chapter_ instance. If you have 10, 50, or 100 chapters around the world, then they all can be hosted on a single web server at a relatively fixed cost.

Your organization will pay for, own, and control the _Chapter_ instance and any associated accounts and data.

* Web Hosting: For simplicity, a "1-click" host will be suggested for organizations without an existing, capable hosting platform with a cost of as little as $10 USD per month. If your organization has existing hardware or cloud infrastructure, then your administrator should be able to provide an accurate estimate. In some cases, Chapter could be hosted in parallel at no extra hosting cost. * Email: Organizations with existing SMTP or transaction-based email services can expect little to no extra cost, but this depends on the volume of notifications (reminders, account notices, etc) which originate from your Chapter instance. Otherwise, the cost of a new 3rd party email sending server can range from free (up to 62,000 emails per month) to per 1000 emails, to $15 USD per month for up to 100,000 emails per month. Costs would increase based on volume of emails sent per month.

What are the minimum hardware requirements to run Chapter?

TBD

How many local chapters can we support?

There is no limits to the number of _chapters_. However, your _organization_ will need to provide hosting with enough resources to accommodate any higher levels of traffic and resource requirements.

Can Chapter be run on our existing hardware / server?

Yes, if your _organization_ has an existing web server infrastructure running an up-to-date Linux operating system.

Can Chapter be run under our existing web domain? Or, is a sub-domain or new domain needed?

Running Chapter within a sub-directory / sub-path of an existing website will not be initially supported. A sub-domain, like chapter.freecodecamp.org, is the expected configuration.

Setup

What technical skills or knowledge is needed to install Chapter?

The initial setup and configuration of an instance of Chapter will require the experience of a system administrator, IT administrator, DevOps, and/or someone with a solid knowledge of web hosting and working with 3rd party software-as-a-service applications.

How does our organization setup a key for Google Sign-in For Websites authentication?

We need to create documentation - with screenshots - for how to create a Google API Key for authentication. We will store this in our .env file.

When organizers do their initial install of Chapter, they will configure this as part of the onboarding.

Is there technical support?

A best-effort at support will be provided by our development community volunteers at (the Chapter project's "Issues" queue)[https://github.com/freeCodeCamp/chapter/issues].

Post-setup

How is the Chapter application kept up to date?

_Chapter_ will tag minor and major releases which can be deployed by a series of manual steps by your _organization's_ IT staff / _owner_ on a schedule they define.

Why are our **Chapter** _instance's_ emails going to into recipients' spam folders?

The most common reason for spam is a mis-configured validation records. This typically involves adding DNS records, such as SPF and DKIM. The email service your using to relay email should have documentation on how to properly setup these records to avoid spam folders.