Helpscout App Template

Do you use Help Scout for handling customer queries?

This project contains a Flask template which allows you setup custom app integration on Help Scout to display information from your user database. An example of such integration can be seen in this screenshot:

It is easy to get started! Simply edit the configuration file to point to your PostgreSQL (for now) instance, and the web app will be ready. It is also fully customizable to your liking.

If you have not configured a Help Scout custom app before, please read their Developer Documentation for Custom Apps before proceeding. This would save you from having tons of headaches later.

Requirements

Python >= 2.6

At this stage, this project is only tested on Python 2.x. Support for Python 3.3 will be coming very soon!

Getting Started

First, clone the project off Github to your server, as Help Scout requires a publicly accessible IP / Domain to access the Flask instance. Then, install the requirements (preferbly into a virtualenv) before editing the configuration file:

pip install -r requirements.txt
# copy config.example.py to config.py
# edit config.py

cp config.example.py config.py
$EDITOR config.py

Notable configurations:

HELPSCOUT_SECRET: This is the secret key you have set when creating a Help Scout custom app.
DB_HOST, DB_NAME, ...: Database connection parameters to your PostgreSQL database.

By default, Help Scout will force a HTTPS connection to your predefined callback URL when setting up the custom app. For debugging purpose, you can enable Debug mode for your custom app to use HTTP.

** Warning **: Do not use plain HTTP after debugging!

You can run the Flask development server by running the following command:

python manage.py runserver

The default callback URL is http://<your-server-ip-or-domain/get-user/

Point your callback URL for your custom app to the server, and check there are any misconfigrations. If all is well, you should see the following reply from the Flask application:

{'html': '<h3>some-username</h3>'}

Customizations

HTML output

The HTML output is rendered using Jinja2's templating engine. You can modify the default template by editing this file: helpscout_django/templates/api/helpscout.html

SQL queries

This Flask template uses MoSQL, a lightweight Database library which allows queries to be constructed using Python data structures. More complicated queries can be constructed using join and select helpers from the library.

Of course, there is nothing stopping you from running SQLAlachemy to handle your database needs.

Callback endpoints

This callback API endpoints are available as a Flask blueprint. You can modify the callback URL or add your own endpoints by editing the helpscout_django/api/views.py file.

Upcoming plans

Pull requests are welcome for the following features, or any feature requests you may have.

Python 3.x support
Support for more databases apart from the default PostgreSQL at the moment
Better docs!

License

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.

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