slapfiliate v1.0.3

Slapfiliate

Slapfiliate is a lightweight application designed to handle Tapfiliate payouts via PayPal. To keep the footprint small, it was built without scheduling capabilities and is meant to be run via cronjob or task scheduler.

What it does

Running the application will:

• Query tapfiliate for outstanding affiliate balances
• If a pay floor is established, filter out affiliates with balances less than the pay floor
• Retrieve payout methods for each affiliate with a balance (currently only supports PayPal)
• If the number of potential payouts exceeds 15,000 (PayPal's batch payment limit), prioritize the highest balances and discard the remainder
• Post a batch payment to PayPal
• Post payment information back to Tapfiliate

How it works

Slapfiliate is paranoid and will fail as early as possible (prior to posting batch payments) instead of half-completing jobs. If the environment is not set to production (NODE_ENV=production), slapfiliate will inject sandbox accounts to prevent actual payouts from being created in PayPal (though, these balances will still be posted to Tapfiliate). With no NODE_ENV set, slapfiliate will default to development.

Setup

1. First install nodejs with sudo apt install nodejs on Debian-based systems (alternatively, check out https://nodejs.org/en/download/ for other installation options).
2. Pull the repository down to your local machine by cloning the repository.

• By installing git and running: cd /opt/ && git clone https://github.com/iangoodnight/slapfiliate.git
• Or using cUrl with: curl -L https://github.com/iangoodnight/slapfiliate/archive/master.zip > \ slapfiliate.tar.gz && tar -zxvf slapfiliate.tar.gz

3. Install dependencies with cd slapfiliate/ && npm install for the entire package, or with cd slapfiliate/ && npm install --production to install the package without development dependencies.
4. Set your secret keys using .env.example and filling in the missing values.
5. Rename .env.example with mv .env.example .env.
6. If you have installed the entire package (with devDependencies) you can test your installation with npm test.
7. If everything looks right, you can run the application with npm start.
8. Logs will be mailed to the email address provided in the .env file.

Creating a cronjob

1. Grant the 'execute' permission to the root of slapfiliate: sudo chmod +x /opt/slapfiliate/index.js
2. Setup your crontab with the command: crontab -e
3. Crontab uses the syntax m h dom mon dow command referring to minute, hour, day of month, month, and day of week respectively with * actiing as a wildcard for 'any'. Occasionally, the relative paths called from node programs don't play nice with cronjobs, so we are going to start our by changing directories to the root of slapfiliate. So, if we wanted to run our script once a week our crontab entry might look like: 0 5 * * 1 cd /opt/slapfiliate/ && NODE_ENV=production ./index.js

In the example above, we are setting the NODE_ENV directly as part of the command itself. The NODE_ENV can be set throught the .env file as well, but in any cases where it is not set, slapfiliate will default to development. Especially in testing, it is best practice to leave this environmental variable set to development and to explicitly override it when calling the script. This helps to keep erroneous payments from going out during setup or troubleshooting. By default, the output from cronjobs goes to /var/mail/, but you can override this by redirecting the output as part of the command. So the crontab entry: 0 5 * * 1 cd /opt/slapfiliate/ && NODE_ENV=production ./index.js > ./run.log Runs the program in the production environment, and saves the output from that last job to the file /opt/slapfiliate/run.log for review.