Changes about data privacy are rippling out worldwide, because of the new law from Europe: the GDPR.

Set to take effect on May 25th of this year, this new law restricts the data that companies can collect, and more specifically, how to store and use these data. So, before using any SaaS tool for marketing, sales or analytics, we have to take a step back, and think about the impact this new tool can have on your GDPR data compliance checkist. Open source and self-hosted tools like Mautic significantly reduce the complexity of your compliance checklist (they also have a great post about it).

Mautic provides free and open source marketing automation software available to everyone; free email marketing software, lead management software and more.

This post is about how you can deploy step by step your own Mautic server on Clever Cloud (within a Europe-only zone) using Git.

Requirements

If you haven't done it yet, download the archive here and unzip it in an empty directory.

Then, create a PHP application linked with a MySQL add-on from the Clever Cloud Console or directly from you terminal using the Clever Cloud CLI:

$ clever create --type php mautic-php --alias production

$ # For MySQL, let's show available plans:
$ clever addon providers show mysql-addon
$ # For a matter of performance, let's create 'mautic-mysql' add-on with the 'm' plan
$ clever addon create mysql-addon --plan m mautic-mysql-M --link mautic-php

You also have to create 2 FS Bucket add-ons that we will configure in the next part.

$ clever addon create fs-bucket mautic-fs-media --link mautic-php
$ clever addon create fs-bucket mautic-fs-config --link mautic-php

Dynamic contents

In order to keep everything persisted between two deployments, we will use the two FS Bucket add-ons to store files that will be modified during the installation.

You need to add two variables in your application's environment to link those FS Buckets with the corresponding directories.

Note: The fs_bucket_host can be found in each FS Bucket dashboards.

CC_FS_BUCKET=/media:<fs_bucket_host_1>
CC_FS_BUCKET_1=/app/config:<fs_bucket_host_2>

The next step is to upload the content of the media directory to the first FS Bucket and the content of the app/config directory to the second FS Bucket. You can use FileZilla to upload those files.

Once everything is uploaded, delete the content of those directories (FS Bucket add-on has to be linked to an empty directory).

Crontab

One of the main features of Mautic is e-mail delivery. You can't use this feature if you haven't configured crontab.

Therefore, we will configure 3 crons to update segments and trigger campaigns by adding a script in the cron-scripts directory at the root of the main directory.

cron-scripts/mautic_cron.sh

#! /usr/bin/env bash
source /home/bas/applicationrc
/usr/bin/php ${APP_HOME}/app/console $1

Then, we create a clevercloud/cron.json file containing the lines below to trigger the script:

[
  "0,15,30,45 *  * * * sh $ROOT/cron-scripts/mautic_cron.sh mautic:segments:update",
  "5,20,35,50 *  * * * sh $ROOT/cron-scripts/mautic_cron.sh mautic:campaigns:update",
  "10,25,40,55 *  * * * sh $ROOT/cron-scripts/mautic_cron.sh mautic:campaigns:trigger"
]

Going further with crontab

You might want to go further in your marketing automation and add new crons to trigger updates for social automation for example. The full list of crons is available here.

Deploying Mautic on Clever Cloud

Now it's time to use Git to deploy it to Clever Cloud.

$ git init
$ git add .
$ git commit -m "Mautic init config"

$ # if you have installed the Clever Cloud CLI
$ clever link <APP_ID | APP_NAME>
$ clever deploy

# else use a remote
$ git remote add clever <REMOTE_URL> # (available in the information of your app)
$ git push clever master

Wait for a few seconds, and your application should be running!

Configuration screen

The configuration is pretty straightforward. Follow the instructions and fill it with MySQL's credentials which you can find in the add-on configuration screen of the web console of Clever Cloud.

You also have to setup the Mailer transport.

What can I do now ?

After logging in, you can start configuring your marketing automations with the Mautic Documentation.

If you need help while deploying your own Mautic server on Clever Cloud, join the Clever Cloud Gitter and ask us any questions. Thanks for reading, and don't hesitate to reach our support if you need anything! ✌️

Those days, gathering data is a pretty important thing to improve your application. It can, indeed, help you optimize your website by knowing where your visitors are clicking. All those informations are collected thanks to analytics platforms such as Piwik.

What is Piwik ?

Piwik is the leading open-source analytics platform that gives you, on top of good analytics, 100% data ownership and user privacy protection. You can know how many people visited a specific page and even set goals. For example, if you redirect your visitor to a thank you page if they buy your 10$ product, you can set a goal that says "If the visitor comes on this page, I will earn 10$". Therefore, you can have an entiere overview of your profits. You can use this link to access the Piwik demo and discover the graphical interface.

How can I run my Piwik server ?

So you want to deploy a Piwik server using Clever Cloud. The Piwik server is a PHP application, therefore there are two ways to install it. The easiest one is explained down below, using SFTP but you can also install the server locally and push it with git. If you want to set it up fastly and easily, just follow those few steps and you will be able to get analytics from your application in a few minutes !

Three simple steps

First things first, create a PHP SFTP application in the Clever Cloud console and link it with a MySQL addon.

Then, unzip the Piwik file available here and upload the content of the directory piwik at the root of your FSBucket. You can use for example, FileZilla to upload those files. Don't forget to add a .user.ini file with the line always_populate_raw_post_data=-1 in order to install Piwik.

The final step is to deploy your application and start the installation by clicking on your application link. If you have any issue, you can check the installation guide. When you have to setup your MySQL database, click on your MySQL addon in the Clever Cloud console and fill the form with (left: field name in Piwik/right: field name in MySQL):

• Database server : Host
• Login : User
• Password : Password
• Database name : Database

And that's it ! Your Piwik server is now ready to give you informations about your traffic. Don't forget to add the JavaScript code on each page. You can start setting up your own goals as mentioned above. If you have a big amount of traffic, don't hesitate to check this page that explains how you can optimize your Piwik server.

If you have not created your Clever Cloud account yet, you can sign up here and start creating your application.

Hi there, I am Corentin Cailleaud, a second year student at Nantes. It has been already a month since I am in internship here at Clever Cloud. My first mission was to complete the API documentation and this job is now over. Let's have a look.

The Clever Cloud API is a tool that allows you to manage your account and your products. In order to help you using this API, I have updated the documentation, available here. Most of endpoints are now delivered with input and output models. Let's see what it means and why using the API is now easier !

How is defined our API documentation ?

Our API documentation is defined by a Swagger file. Swagger is the world's most popular framework for APIs. It helps us describing our API and it gives you a good interface to get started with this tool.

Let's take an example : you want to create a new application.

• First you have to find the endpoint in the list. You can use resource's name to find it easily. Here we want an endpoint about application so let's find "POST /self/applications" in the "applications" list.

• Then, you have to click on the endpoint to know the input model you have to give.

If you are logged in, you can click on the "Try it out!" button to try your request !

Restlet Studio FTW

I used Restlet Studio to modify this file as it was easier than updating the Swagger file directly from a text editor. Indeed, Restlet Studio allows you to create representations with few clicks. That's a very cool tool, here is a link to their Getting Started.

Why this update

Before this update, you could not know everything about an endpoint, there was kind of a fog of war. When you clicked on the endpoint, you could not know what to give in input.

Before

Now, the weather is clear, all those informations are available ! You can even click on the model and it automatically goes in the box, where you can modify it.

After

The goal of this update is to be able to generate API client whenever the API is updated thanks to swagger-codegen. This tool can generate, from a Swagger definition, API client in different languages using different libraries. When this feature is available, your clients will be automatically updated when a new version of the API will be released.