Serverless Forms

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

It is a simple nodejs server which forwards all POST submission by email. Inspired by the excellent formspree which is not open source anymore and it was too hard to self host anyway.

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 cookie.

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

Links:

• repository on github
• package on npm

Features and road map

• Send email with submited form data
• Send email to multiple recipients
• Use tokens in place of email addresses to avoid spam
• Make sure sensitive data is not logged or stored on the server
• Thank you page redirection
• Use tokens instead of emails to avoid being scrapped and spammed
• Easy self hosting with a docker image or instructions for nodejs
• Honeypot field to avoid spam
• Webhook to send data to other services
• Error page redirection or message in GET
• Send confirmation email to the form submitter
• Captcha to avoid spam
• Localisation of the messages / emails (i18n, multiple languages)

Usage

Test with the example form

Open http://localhost:8080 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 which POST data to the server, it will keep sending you all the field of the form by email.

Example:

<form method="post" action="http://localhost:8080">
  <input type="text" name="name" placeholder="Name" required>
  <input type="email" name="email" placeholder="Email" required>
  <textarea name="message" placeholder="Message" required></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 method="post" action="http://localhost:8080">
  <input type="hidden" name="token" value="token1">
  <input type="text" name="name" placeholder="Name" required>
  <input type="email" name="email" placeholder="Email" required>
  <textarea name="message" placeholder="Message" required></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 method="post" action="http://localhost:8080">
  <input type="text" name="name" placeholder="Name" required>
  <input type="email" name="email" placeholder="Email" required>
  <textarea name="message" placeholder="Message" required></textarea>
  <button type="submit">Send</button>
  <input type="hidden" name="thanks" value="http://localhost:8080/thank-you.html">
</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 method="post" action="http://localhost:8080">
  <input type="text" name="name" placeholder="Name" required>
  <input type="email" name="email" placeholder="Email" required>
  <textarea name="message" placeholder="Message" required></textarea>
  <button type="submit">Send</button>
  <input type="hidden" name="site" value="My Site">
</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

1 click deploy

Deploy in 1 click on heroku

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)