About Caroster
Caroster is a simple, free and open-source carpooling app designed to makes it easy to organize shared trips for an event, a party, a seminar, a sport game, a camp or any other trip.
Our vision is to make Caroster a true digital common, a project collectively governed by its community, beyond any individual or organization. Our ambition is for Caroster to survive its creators, growing through shared governance and open collaboration.
Caroster is developed and provided by Octree, a sustainable startup studio based in Geneva. Octree is made up of a committed team that aims to provide tools that respect human and ecological values.
We believe that all creations should be free of rights, freely modifiable or duplicable, to serve as many people as possible. We prefer cooperation to competition, so Caroster is an open source project under the GNU - AGPL 3.0 license.
We welcome contributions from anyone who shares our vision of a more sustainable and cooperative world :)
Are you on GitHub ? Please use the reference repository on GitLab for issues and pull requests.
Features
This project makes it easy to:
- 📅 Create a dedicated carpool page for each event
- ⚙️ Customize event settings (description, location, date)
- 🗺️ See trips proposed on a map
- 🚗 Propose a trip as driver in just a few clicks
- 👤 Add to a trip as passenger in just a few clicks
- ⏳ Request a trip in the waiting list menu for passengers
- 🔄 Manage round trips for the event
- 🔍 Search for a trip by departure location with a search bar
- 🔔 Get email notifications when a new trip is available
- 📬 Receive weekly summary emails for organizers
- 🛠️ Manage event with administrator roles (Caroster paid only)
Getting Started
These instructions will get you a copy of the project up and running on your local machine for development and testing purposes.
Caroster is composed of two parts:
Caroster is currently in Beta. Big changes can happen, especially in terms of data architecture.
Prerequisites
To fully utilize your instance of Caroster, you will need an SMTP configuration to send emails.
(Optional) Mapbox token
In order to activate geocoding and map features, you will need a Mapbox token.
Create a mapbox account if you don’t have any and generate your token for free.
There is no need to setup a payment method as long as you don’t exceed the temporary geocoding api free rate , but if you do so, the app will still work and geocoding will simply disable till the end of the ongoing month.
Copy the mapbox token in the .env file as a value for “MAPBOX_TOKEN” variable to start using geocoding and map features;
Tiles server
You can use the TOKEN_FREE_TILES variables in the .env file to setup a tiles server used by the map features. By default, we use the © OpenStreetMap test server.
Make sure to respect the copyrights of the tiles server you setup, or those from © OpenStreetMap if you keep the default settings.
:warning: Be aware that some services might require a token to use their tiles server.
- We don’t have yet developed a way to obfuscate this token from the users.
:warning: This means anyone accessing the application will be able to use this token on your behalf, which exposes you to substantial risks (financial, legal, reputational, operational) that may affect you and the disponibility of the service.
Installing
Clone the repo locally:
git clone https://git.octree.ch/p/caroster.git
cd caroster
Run with Docker
First, edit docker-compose.yml to provide your SMTP configuration and optional Mapbox token:
version: "3"
services:
app:
...
MAPBOX_TOKEN: pk.mapbox.token
SMTP_HOST: smtp.myserver.org
SMTP_PORT: 587
SMTP_USERNAME: user
SMTP_PASSWORD: password
...
Then, create containers with Docker Compose:
docker compose up
Wait a few minutes while the application downloads needed packages, then go to http://localhost:8080.
You can log on http://localhost:8080/admin with email admin@example.org
and password caroster.
Development
Frontend
These steps will prepare the frontend to run in development mode.
cd frontend
yarn # or 'npm install'
yarn dev
The frontend is now accessible on http://localhost:3000
Backend
These steps will prepare and configure the backend to run in development mode.
You need a Postgres database running locally. Start one with
docker compose up psql -d.
cd backend
yarn # or 'npm install'
cp .env.example .env
vi .env # Edit with your own configuration
yarn develop
The Strapi server is now ready and the admin is accessible on http://localhost:1337/admin.
Running the tests
A few tests are available to check GraphQL endpoints behavior in the e2e directory.
First, run Strapi in test mode:
cd backend
cp .env.example .env
vi .env # Edit with your own configuration
yarn start-test
Then, run the tests:
cd e2e
yarn
yarn gql
yarn test
Contributing
Please read CONTRIBUTING.md for details on the process for submitting pull requests to us. All contributors and persons involved in the project follow our code of conduct.
N.B. Use our Gitlab to submit any PR or issues
Authors
- Octree - sustainable startup studio - https://octree.ch
See also the list of contributors who participated in this project.
License
This project is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3 - see the LICENSE.md file for details