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Async

Open source SaaS web app.

Async's main features are: (1) Chat for real-time, synchronous communication, (2) Discussions for asynchronous communication, (3) All communication (chats + discussions) can be organized by team.

Async was built from our popular open source SaaS boilerplate. We built Async for communication within our internal team and with our clients from custom dev business. By separating synchronous (urgent) vs. asynchronous (non-urgent) conversations, we minimized distractions while working on big tasks while still reacting to urgent requests.

You can use Async as a self-hosted communication web app for your team. You can also use Async as a starting point for building a more complex SaaS web application.

Other projects that we built:

• Builder Book - learn how to build full-stack web apps from scratch
• SaaS Boilerplate - open source web app to build your own SaaS product
• Async - open source urgent vs non-urgent team communication tool for small teams
• Work in biotech - job board for biotech startup companies
• AI-cruiter - browser extension is built for recruiters managing a high volume of job applicants. AI-cruiter uses LLMs - like ChatGPT, PaLM 2, our private fine-tuned LLM - to generate succinct and relevant summaries of your job applicants' resumes
• Async Labs - many custom dev projects

Live demo:

• APP: https://1.async-await.com
• API: https://api-xphxggip.async-await.com

Sponsors

Contents

• Features
• Run locally
• Deploy
• Built with
• Screenshots
• Contributing
• Team

Features

• Chat for real-time, synchronous communication
• Discussions for long-form, asynchronous communication
• Team creation, Team Member invitation, and settings for Team and User.
• Server-side rendering for fast initial load and SEO.
• User authentication with Passwordless, cookie, and session.
• Production-ready Express server with compression, parser, and helmet.
• Transactional emails (AWS SES): welcome, login, and team invitation.
• File upload, load, and deletion (AWS S3) with pre-signed request for: Comment, Message, Team Profile, and User Profile.
• Websockets with socket.io v3.
• Opinionated architecture:
  • keeping babel and webpack configurations under the hood,
  • striving to minimize number of configurations,
  • HOC extensions MyApp and MyDocument
  • server-side rendering with Material-UI,
  • model-specific components in addition to common components.
• Universally-available environmental variables at runtime.
• Custom logger (configure what not to print in production).
• Useful components for any web app: Confirmer, Notifier, Loading, MenuWithLinks, and more.
• Production-ready, scalable architecture:
  • app - user-facing web app with Next/Express server, responsible for rendering pages (either client-side or server-side rendered). app sends requests via API methods to api Express server.
  • api - server-only code, Express server, responsible for processing requests for internal and external API infrastructures.
• Subscriptions with Stripe:
  • subscribe/unsubscribe Team to plan,
  • update card information,
  • verified Stripe webhook for failed payment for subscription.

Running api locally:

• Before running, create a .env file inside the api folder with the environmental variables as shown below.

api/.env:

# Used in api/server/server.ts
MONGO_URL_TEST=
MONGO_URL=
SESSION_NAME=
SESSION_SECRET=

# Used in api/server/aws-s3.ts and api/server/aws-ses.ts
AWS_REGION=
AWS_ACCESSKEYID=
AWS_SECRETACCESSKEY=
BUCKET_FOR_FILES=

# Used in api/server/passwordless.tx and api/server/models/User.ts
FROM_EMAIL_ADDRESS=

----------
# All env variables above this line are required for successful user signup

# Used in api/server/stripe.ts
STRIPE_TEST_SECRET_KEY=
STRIPE_LIVE_SECRET_KEY=
STRIPE_TEST_PRICE_ID=
STRIPE_LIVE_PRICE_ID=
STRIPE_LIVE_ENDPOINT_SECRET=

# Optionally determine the URL
URL_APP="https://localhost:3000"
PRODUCTION_URL_APP="https://1.async-await.com"
API_SERVER_ENDPOINT="http://localhost:8000"
PRODUCTION_API_SERVER_ENDPOINT="https://api-xphxggip.async-await.com"

# Used in api/server/api/index.ts
ENCRYPTION_KEY=

• Your .env file file must have values for the required variables. To use all features and third-party integrations, also add the optional variables.

• IMPORTANT: use your values for PRODUCTION_URL_APP and PRODUCTION_API_SERVER_ENDPOINT. These are values for domain name that you own.

• IMPORTANT: The above environmental variables are available on the server only. You should add your .env file to .gitignore inside the api folder so that your secret keys are not stored on a remote Github repo.

• To get value for MONGO_URL_TEST, we recommend you use a free MongoDB at MongoDB Atlas or $15/month MongoDB at Digital Ocean

• Specify your own name and secret keys for Express session: SESSION_NAME and SESSION_SECRET

• Once .env is created, you can run the api app. Navigate to the api folder, run yarn install to add all packages, then run the command below:

  yarn dev
  

Running app locally:

• Navigate to the app folder, run yarn to add all packages, then run yarn dev and navigate to http://localhost:3000:

  • A .env file in the app folder is not required to run, but you can create one to override the default variables. The environmental variables for .env in the app folder are shown below.
    

    NEXT_PUBLIC_URL_APP="http://localhost:3000"
    NEXT_PUBLIC_PRODUCTION_URL_APP="https://1.async-await.com"
  
    NEXT_PUBLIC_API_SERVER_ENDPOINT="http://localhost:8000"
    NEXT_PUBLIC_PRODUCTION_API_SERVER_ENDPOINT="https://api-xphxggip.async-await.com"
  
    NEXT_PUBLIC_STRIPE_TEST_PUBLISHABLEKEY="pk_test_xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx"
    NEXT_PUBLIC_STRIPE_LIVE_PUBLISHABLEKEY="pk_live_xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx"
  
    NEXT_PUBLIC_API_GATEWAY_ENDPOINT=
    NEXT_PUBLIC_ENCRYPTION_KEY_FOR_EXTERNAL_SERVICES=
  
    NEXT_TELEMETRY_DISABLED=1
  
  

  • IMPORTANT: use your values for NEXT_PUBLIC_PRODUCTION_URL_APP and NEXT_PUBLIC_PRODUCTION_API_SERVER_ENDPOINT. These are values for domain name that you own.

  • To get NEXT_PUBLIC_STRIPE_TEST_PUBLISHABLEKEY, go to your Stripe dashboard, click Developers, then click API keys.

• For successful file uploading, make sure your AWS bucket has the proper CORS configuration. Go to your AWS account, find your bucket, go to Permissions > CORS configuration, add:

[
  {
    "AllowedHeaders":[
      "*"
    ],
    "AllowedMethods":[
      "PUT",
      "POST",
      "GET",
      "HEAD",
      "DELETE"
    ],
    "AllowedOrigins":[
      "http://localhost:3000",
      "https://1.async-await.com"
    ],
    "ExposeHeaders":[
      "ETag",
      "x-amz-meta-custom-header"
    ]
  }
]

• Make sure to update allowed origin with your actual values for NEXT_PUBLIC_URL_APP and NEXT_PUBLIC_PRODUCTION_URL_APP.

• Once .env is created, you can run the app app. Navigate to the app folder, run yarn install to add all packages, then run the command below:

  yarn dev
  

Symlink api in lambda:

In lambda directory we are symlinking api directory. You can run symlink command in lambda folder as mentioned below:

bash symlink ../api

Deploy to Heroku, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, API Gateway and AWS Lambda

We give detailed instructions inside Chapter 9 and 10 of our SaaS Boilerplate book: https://builderbook.org/book

Built with

• React
• Material-UI
• Next
• MobX
• Express
• Mongoose
• MongoDB
• Typescript

For more detail, check package.json files in both app and api folders.

To customize styles, check this guide.

Screenshots

Chat for synchronous, urgent communication:

Chat on mobile browser:

Discussion for asynchronous, non-urgent communication:

Discussions consist of Comments, where you can write with Markdown, preview your content, and include attachments.

Multiple team management demonstrated by team switcher:

User settings:

Team settings:

Stripe checkout:

Billing:

Contributing

Want to support this project? Consider buying our books.

Team

• Kelly Burke
• Timur Zhiyentayev

You can contact us at [email protected].

If you are interested in working with us, check out Async Labs.

License

All code in this repository is provided under the MIT License.

Project structure

├── api
│   ├── .elasticbeanstalk
│   │   └── config.yml
│   ├── server
│   │   ├── api
│   │   │   ├── index.ts
│   │   │   ├── public.ts
│   │   │   ├── team-leader.ts
│   │   │   └── team-member.ts
│   │   ├── models
│   │   │   ├── Chat.ts
│   │   │   ├── Comment.ts
│   │   │   ├── Discussion.ts
│   │   │   ├── EmailTemplate.ts
│   │   │   ├── Message.ts
│   │   │   └── User.ts
│   │   ├── utils
│   │   │   ├── markdownToHtml.ts
│   │   │   └── slugify.ts
│   │   ├── aws-s3.ts
│   │   ├── aws-ses.ts
│   │   ├── logs.ts
│   │   ├── passwordless-token.ts
│   │   ├── passwordless-toenstore.ts
│   │   ├── passwordless.ts
│   │   ├── robots.txt
│   │   ├── server.ts
│   │   ├── sockets.ts
│   │   └── stripe.ts
│   ├── .eslintrc.js
│   ├── .gitignore
│   ├── nodemon.json
│   ├── package.json
│   ├── tsconfig.json
│   └── yarn.lock
├── app
│   ├── .elasticbeanstalk
│   │   └── config.yml
│   ├── components
│   │   ├── chats
│   │   │   ├── ChatDetail.tsx
│   │   │   ├── ChatList.tsx
│   │   │   └── SearchWithinChat.tsx
│   │   ├── comments
│   │   │   ├── CommentContext.tsx
│   │   │   ├── CommentDetail.tsx
│   │   │   ├── CommentEditor.tsx
│   │   │   └── CommentForm.tsx
│   │   ├── common
│   │   │   ├── AvatarwithMenu.tsx
│   │   │   ├── Confirmer.tsx
│   │   │   ├── Loading.tsx
│   │   │   ├── LoginForm.tsx
│   │   │   ├── MemberChooser.tsx
│   │   │   ├── MenuWithLinks.tsx
│   │   │   ├── MenuWithMenuItems.tsx
│   │   │   ├── Notifier.tsx
│   │   │   └── SidebarListItem.tsx
│   │   ├── discussions
│   │   │   ├── DiscussionDetail.tsx
│   │   │   ├── DiscussionList.tsx
│   │   │   └── SearchDiscussions.tsx
│   │   ├── layout
│   │   │   ├── index.tsx
│   │   │   └── menu.ts
│   │   ├── messages
│   │   │   ├── MessageContent.tsx
│   │   │   ├── MessageDetail.tsx
│   │   │   ├── MessageEditor.tsx
│   │   │   └── MessageForm.tsx
│   │   ├── settings
│   │   │   └── SettingsMenu.tsx
│   │   ├── teams
│   │   │   ├── CreateTeamModal.tsx
│   │   │   └── InviteMemberModal.tsx
│   ├── lib
│   │   ├── api
│   │   │   ├── makeQueryString.ts
│   │   │   ├── sendRequestAndGetResponse.ts
│   │   │   ├── to-api-server-public.ts
│   │   │   ├── to-api-server-team-leader.ts
│   │   │   ├── to-api-server-team-member.ts
│   │   │   └── to-external-services.ts
│   │   ├── store
│   │   │   ├── Chatts
│   │   │   ├── Comment.ts
│   │   │   ├── Discussion.ts
│   │   │   ├── Message.ts
│   │   │   ├── Team.ts
│   │   │   ├── User.ts
│   │   │   └── index.ts
│   │   ├── confirm.ts
│   │   ├── highlightSearchResult.ts
│   │   ├── isMobile.ts
│   │   ├── notify.ts
│   │   ├── resizeImage.ts
│   │   ├── sharedStyles.ts
│   │   └── theme.ts
│   ├── pages
│   │   ├── public
│   │   │   ├── login.tsx
│   │   │   └── register.tsx
│   │   ├── settings
│   │   │   ├── my-account.tsx
│   │   │   ├── my-billing.tsx
│   │   │   └── team-settings.tsx
│   │   ├── _app.tsx
│   │   ├── _document.tsx
│   │   ├── chat.tsx
│   │   └── discussion.tsx
│   ├── public/fonts
│   │   ├── IBM-Plex-Mono
│   │   │   ├── IBMPlexMono-Regular.woff
│   │   │   └── IBMPlexMono-Regular.woff2
│   │   ├── Roboto
│   │   │   ├── Roboto-Regular.woff
│   │   │   └── Roboto-Regular.woff2
│   │   ├── cdn.css
│   │   └── server.css
│   ├── server
│   │   └── server.ts
│   ├── .babelrc
│   ├── .eslintignore
│   ├── .eslintrc.js
│   ├── .gitignore
│   ├── next-env.d.ts
│   ├── next.config.js
│   ├── nodemon.json
│   ├── package.json
│   ├── tsconfig.json
│   ├── tsconfig.server.json
│   └── yarn.lock
├── lambda
│   ├── src
│   │   └── checkCardExpiration.ts
│   ├── .eslintrc.js
│   ├── .gitignore
│   ├── api
│   ├── handler.ts
│   ├── package.json
│   ├── serverless.yml
│   ├── tsconfig.json
│   ├── tslint.json
│   └── yarn.lock
├── .gitignore
├── LICENSE.md
├── README.md