Deploy and Host Serverless Forms on Railway

Common Use Cases

This project is made for those who need to add forms to their static page or static website.

About Hosting

It is a simple nodejs server which forwards all POST submission by email, inspired by formspree.

Why Deploy

No database, 100% server (nodejs or Docker), just sends the submissions by email.

100% free software. No data is kept on the server. No tracking. No cookies.

Suggestion: thanks to the webhook feature you can automate the management of the submissions with tools like Huginn, node-red, codeberg/forgejo...

Links:

Usage

Test with the example form

Go to your Railway site to see the HTML form which resides in public/form.html.

Submit the form, and it will send you an email with the content of the form.

Customize the form

Create any html form on your web page which will POST data to the server. You'll receive all the form fields in the submission by email.

Example:

<form action="http://localhost:8080" method="post">
  <input required="" placeholder="Name" type="text">
  <input required="" placeholder="Email" name="email" type="email">
  <textarea required="" placeholder="Message" name="message"></textarea>
  <button type="submit">Send</button>
</form>

For this to work, the server must be started with the following environment variables:

TO="[email protected],[email protected]" \
EMAIL_USER="username" \
EMAIL_PASS="*******" \
EMAIL_HOST="mail.gandi.net" \
EMAIL_PORT=587 \
npm start

Tokens

This is a feature to avoid spam. You can use tokens in place of email addresses to avoid spam. The form will be expected to have a hidden field with the name token and the value of the token. If the token is found in the object, the email will be sent to the corresponding email address(es).

Start the app with the following environment variable

TO='{"token1":"[email protected]","token2":"[email protected],[email protected]"}' \
# ... other env variables
npm start

Add a hidden field to your form with the name token and the value of the token you want to use.

<form action="http://localhost:8080" method="post">
  <input value="token1" name="token" type="hidden">
  <input required="" placeholder="Name" type="text">
  <input required="" placeholder="Email" name="email" type="email">
  <textarea required="" placeholder="Message" name="message"></textarea>
  <button type="submit">Send</button>
</form>

Thank you page

You can provide a link to a thank you page in the form. The server will redirect to this page after the form is submitted.

<form action="http://localhost:8080" method="post">
  <input required="" placeholder="Name" type="text">
  <input required="" placeholder="Email" name="email" type="email">
  <textarea required="" placeholder="Message" name="message"></textarea>
  <button type="submit">Send</button>
  <input value="http://localhost:8080/thank-you.html" name="thanks" type="hidden">
</form>

For this to work, you need to start the server with the following environment variable:

REDIRECT=true \
REDIRECT_DOMAINS="localhost,your-domain.com" \
# ... other env variables
npm start

Site name

You can provide a site name to be used in the email subject and body.

<form action="http://localhost:8080" method="post">
  <input required="" placeholder="Name" type="text">
  <input required="" placeholder="Email" name="email" type="email">
  <textarea required="" placeholder="Message" name="message"></textarea>
  <button type="submit">Send</button>
  <input value="My Site" name="site" type="hidden">
</form>

Install

Docker

You can use the docker image available on docker hub to run the serverless form server.

docker run -e EMAIL_USER="username" \
  EMAIL_PASS="********" \
  EMAIL_HOST="mail.gandi.net" \
  EMAIL_PORT=587 \
  TO="[email protected]" \
  -p 8080:8080 lexoyo/serverless-form

Local install

Clone this repository and run the following commands:

$ npm install
$ EMAIL_USER="username" \
  EMAIL_PASS="*******" \
  EMAIL_HOST="mail.gandi.net" \
  EMAIL_PORT=587 \
  TO="[email protected]" \
  npm start

Config

Here are all the environment variables you can use, check the file lib/index.js to see how the default values.

Env var	description
MESSAGE	Message to displayed after the form submission. May contain HTML.
DISCLAIMER	Message added to the email sent to the recipient. May contain HTML.
TO	Email address(es) to send the form to (your email)
TO	A json object with tokens as keys and email addresses as values. The form will be expected to have a hidden field with the name `token` and the value of the token. If the token is found in the object, the email will be sent to the corresponding email address(es).
HOOK	URL to send the form data to as a POST request
HOOK	A json object with tokens as keys and `{ "url": "string", "headers": { "name": "value" } }` as values. The form can have an optional hidden field with the name `token` and the value of the token. If the token is found in the object, the form data will be sent to the corresponding URL.
FROM	Email address to use as sender address
REDIRECT	If set to true, the server will redirect to the URL provided in the `thanks` hidden field of the form
REDIRECT_DOMAINS	Comma separated list of domains for which the server will redirect to the URL provided in the `thanks` hidden field of the form
PORT	Port to listen to for form submissions
FORM	Path to the HTML file containing the example form, defaults to `public/form.html`
EMAIL_HOST	SMTP config: see these options here
EMAIL_PORT	SMTP config: see these options here
EMAIL_USER	SMTP config: see these options here
EMAIL_PASS	SMTP config: see these options here
THANKS_FIELD	Name of the field in the form which contains the URL to redirect to after the form submission
TOKEN_FIELD	Name of the field in the form which contains the token
SITE_FIELD	Name of the field in the form which contains the site name (used in the email subject)
HONEY_FIELD	Name of the field in the form which is a honeypot (if filled, the form will be considered as spam)

Dependencies for Serverless Forms

Deployment Dependencies

Node JS, docker