Installing Mailtrain on OpenBSD

Mailtrain is an open-source self-hosted newsletter application that allows you to manage and send emails to a large number of subscribers. In this tutorial, we will guide you on how to install Mailtrain on OpenBSD.

Prerequisites

Before we begin, make sure your OpenBSD system is up-to-date and has the following packages installed:

• Node.js
• Yarn
• Mysql-client or Postgresql-client

Step 1: Download Mailtrain

We will download the Mailtrain package from the official Github repository. To do this, execute the following command:

$ git clone https://github.com/Mailtrain-org/mailtrain.git

This will clone the latest version of Mailtrain to your current directory.

Step 2: Install dependencies

Next, navigate to the Mailtrain directory and install the dependencies by running the following command:

$ cd mailtrain/
$ yarn install

This will install all the dependencies needed by Mailtrain.

Step 3: Configure database

Mailtrain requires a database to store its data. You can use either Mysql or Postgresql for this. In this tutorial, we will be using Mysql as our database server.

Create a new database for Mailtrain and a new user with full privileges on that database. Execute the following command:

$ mysql -u root -p
Enter password:

This will log you in to the Mysql shell. Once you're logged in, create a new database and user with the following commands:

CREATE DATABASE mailtrain;
CREATE USER 'mailtrain'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'password';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON mailtrain.* TO 'mailtrain'@'localhost';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

Replace "password" with a secure password of your choice. Note down the database name, database user, and password as we will need these later.

Step 4: Configure Mailtrain

Copy the .env.example file to .env with the following command:

$ cp .env.example .env

Then edit the .env file using your favorite text editor:

$ vi .env

In the .env file, update the DATABASE_URL with the details of your database. For example:

DATABASE_URL=mysql://mailtrain:password@localhost:3306/mailtrain

Next, set the LISTS_API_KEY to a random string. Make sure that this string is secure as it will authenticate your API requests.

LISTS_API_KEY=my_random_api_key

Save and close the file.

Step 5: Generate SSL certificate (Optional)

If you want to serve Mailtrain over HTTPS, you need to generate an SSL certificate. Let's create a self-signed certificate for this tutorial.

To create a self-signed SSL certificate, run the following command:

$ openssl req -newkey rsa:2048 -nodes -keyout key.pem -x509 -days 365 -out cert.pem

Follow the prompts and enter the required information. This will create two files, key.pem and cert.pem.

Step 6: Start the Mailtrain server

Finally, we can start the Mailtrain server with the following command:

$ yarn run dev

This will start the server in development mode. You can access it by navigating to http://localhost:3000 in your web browser.

If you want to start the server in production mode, use the following command:

$ NODE_ENV=production yarn run build
$ NODE_ENV=production yarn start

Step 7: Access Mailtrain

You can access Mailtrain in your web browser at http://localhost:3000 (or https://localhost:3000 if using SSL).

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Mailtrain on OpenBSD. You can now configure and use Mailtrain to send newsletters to your subscribers.

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