Spoke

Spoke is an open source text-distribution tool for organizations to mobilize supporters and members into action. Spoke allows you to upload phone numbers, customize scripts and assign volunteers to communicate with supporters while allowing organizations to manage the process.

Spoke was created by Saikat Chakrabarti and Sheena Pakanati, and is now maintained by MoveOn.

This is the fork of Spoke developed by Elizabeth Warren's 2020 presidential campaign. It was built in the last month of the campaign and was used by thousands of volunteers to send millions of texts a day in the run-up to Super Tuesday. It is based off of the staging_20191102 branch of the Working Families Party's fork of MoveOn's Spoke.

We did not try to maintain compatibility with upstream Spoke or test features and deployment strategies we did not use. This README describes only how to run this fork, see ORIGINAL_README.md for the original documentation.

How the Warren campaign deployed Spoke

This fork was deployed to AWS Lambda and API Gateway using the serverless framework. We used Aurora Postgres Serverless for our database and ElastiCache.

To deploy the frontend, we used Webpack to build the client-side bundle and deployed that the an S3 bucket with a CloudFront CDN in front of it. The Spoke backend would render the HTML for the page, with a script tag pointing to the webpack bundle on the CDN domain.

In order to minimize the impact of cold starts, we used a gradual rollout orchestrated by CodeDeploy. This was set up and managed by serverless-plugin-canary-deployment. Without the gradual rollout, during a deploy we'd experience high latencies due to cold starts and Spoke's slow startup time. This would cause Lambda to spin up many parallel containers to handle the traffic with the longer latency, which would in turn spike the number of database connections. Because our database (an Aurora Serverless Postgres database) had a connection limit of 5,500 connection, this spike could bring us very close to this limit. So we used the gradual CodeDeploy rollout to switch traffic over to the new version over 10 minutes, which minimized the impact of the cold starts and avoided the spike in database connections.

This added some complexity to the frontend rollout: in the middle of a rollout, with half of the traffic going to the old lambda function, and half of the traffic going to the new lambda function, we didn't want a user to get the new javascript bundle but then hit the old lambda function when making graphql requests, because the new frontend code might depend on new graphql endpoints that didn't exist in the old lambda function. So we had render-index.js read which frontend bundle to point to from Redis. This meant that we could deploy new code to lambda but have that new code still serve the old frontend, and then when the deploy was done rolling out, we could just write to Redis and have the backend start linking to the new frontend.

We orchestrated this through the "preflight" and "postflight" functions in src/server/lambda/codedeploy.js. These are configured as the preTrafficHook and postTrafficHook for serverless-plugin-canary-deployments in serverless.yml. The overall process was:

• A new tag in github starting with release- would kick off a Github Action run to deploy to production. You can find this workflow in .github/workflows/prod-deploy.yml.
• The workflow would run ./dev-tools/sentry-release-create.sh to create a new release in Sentry (you can remove this step if you don't use Sentry).
• The workflow would run make deploy-build, which did a number of deploy steps:
  • Builds the frontend Javascript bundles.
  • Copies the frontend Javascript bundles to the S3 bucket, where they live alongside the old javascript bundles. The lambda function continue to render HTML that points to the old javascript bundles (the javascript bundles include a hash of the content in the file name, so there's no name conflicts)
  • Runs the serverless deploy. This creates a new version of the lambda function, and thanks to serverless-plugin-canary-deployments, kicks off a CodeDeploy deployment to gradually shift traffic to the new lambda function. We haven't yet updated the bundle name in Redis, so as traffic shifts to the new lambda function, everyone continues to use the old client code.
  • Before CodeDeploy shifts any traffic, it runs the preflight hook, which executes database migrations.
  • After CodeDeploy has shifted all traffic, it runs the postflight hook, which writes to Redis to instruct all the lambda functions to start pointing to the new client bundle. At this point, we're fully up and running with the new version (but users who have not yet refreshed will continue to use the old client code indefinitely, so backwards-compatibility with old client code is still important!).
  • Lastly, the github workflow runs ./dev-tools/sentry-release-finalize.sh to inform Sentry that the new release is deployed.

If you're operating at a lower scale, or using a deployment of Postgres where you're not concerned about having a large spike in concurrent connections, you might not need this complexity. In that case, you should update render-index.js to just always serve the latest bundle, and switch traffic to the new version all at once. You might even want to drop the complexity of a separate asset domain, and use the upstream MoveOn Spoke behavior of just serving the client javascript directly from the application server.

Notable changes from upstream Spoke

• Removed support for Nexmo
• Removed support for Mailgun and custom SMTP servers in favor of SES
• Removed and renamed some env vars, notable TWILIO_API_KEY -> TWILIO_ACCOUNT_SID
• Removed asynchronous processing of Twilio responses
• Removed opt-out caching, which was incomplete in this fork
• Added support for using a different Twilio Messaging Service for each campaign
• Added external_id_type and state_code as top-level fields to campaign_contact
• Removed support for zip on campaign_contact
• Removed support for sqlite
• Reworked background jobs to run on Lambda, removed support for cron'd jobs
• Added slack log in
• Changed the invite flow
• Split the texter experience into separate components for initial sends and replies
• Removed bulk send
• Phone number management (see below)
• Reworked dynamic assignment experience, removed support for static assignment
• Moved message review to the campaign screen
• Added the concept of 'labels' for data collection through canned responses
• Added canned response upload from CSV
• Reworked navigation and canned response UI for the texter view
• Rewrote contact uploads to go through S3, which was required to upload large files while running on Lambda
• Started migrating from thinky to knex queries (see the src/server/db/README)
• Improved error handling
• Made archiving permanent and added new CLOSED and CLOSED_FOR_INITIAL_SENDS campaign statuses

Running for the first time

1. Copy .env.example to .env and adjust any settings you want to adjust
2. Run docker-compose up to start the db. Leave this running in another terminal while you run the next couple commands.
3. Run yarn run create-test-db && ./dev-tools/reset-db.sh
4. Now you're ready to run Spoke! yarn run dev

The ./dev-tools/reset-db.sh you ran reset the database to its default state. This includes a couple of organizations, and three test accounts for you to use:

• Owner: spoke@example.com / password spoke
• Admin: spoke-admin@example.com / password spoke-admin
• Texter: spoke-texter@example.com / password spoke-texter

Head to http://localhost:3000 to log in! You can now create a campaign. You can use the dev-tools/generate-test-data.py script to generate a CSV, or just use `dev-tools/

The default configuration uses an auto-responder configuration where half of the contacts you text will auto-respond. You can adjust the ratio in .env. When you're ready to test sending some real texts, you'll need to connect Spoke to your Twilio account, create a messaging service in Twilio, and purchase a phone number.

You'll also need to be set up so that Twilio can talk to your development machine. The easiest way to do this is with ngrok. Run ngrok http 3000 and you'll get an ngrok URL that lets Twilio talk to your dev server. Now you're ready to set up Twilio:

1. Configure .env with your Twilio credentials
2. Create a messaging service: ./dev-tools/manage-messaging-services.js --command create --friendlyName <your test messaging service name> " --baseUrl <your ngrok url>
3. Buy a phone number and attach it to the messaging service: ./dev-tools/buy-numbers.js --areaCode <any area code> --messagingServiceSid <your TWILIO_MESSAGE_SERVICE_SID> --limit 1

Running for not the first time

Open two terminal windows:

1. docker-compose up
2. yarn run dev

Updating ngrok url for messaging service

./dev-tools/manage-messaging-services.js --command update --baseUrl <YOUR_NGROK_URL> --sid <TWILIO_MESSAGE_SERVICE_SID>

Testing with auto-responders

If you'd like to test spoke without actually sending texts, you have a couple options.

Skipping Twilio

We have an option to skip sending texts through Twilio and just simulating replies. In your .env, add the following two lines:

# This makes Spoke not send any real texts and just simulate a reply coming back
SKIP_TWILIO_AND_AUTOREPLY=1

# This makes Spoke randomly drop 60% of messages (so only ~40% of contacts will respond). This is based on
# a hash of the contact's phone number, so a particular contact will have a 60% chance of responding to
# the initial text, and then if they do respond they will continue to respond to future messages.
DROP_MESSAGE_RATIO=0.6

This is the default configuration in .env.example.

If you want to test out finishing a conversation, you can send any message that starts with done, and the auto-replier won't reply to it.

Twilio Autoresponder

If you're working with the Twilio code itself, you may want to actually keep Twilio in the loop and send real texts. To do this, first set up a phone number in Twilio to autoreply to texts. You can just buy a number and point it to this TwiML Bin:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<Response>
    <Message>
        {{Body}} (auto-reply)
    </Message>
</Response>

For the purpose of this example, we'll assume the phone number you set up was +16173974753. In your .env, replace SKIP_TWILIO_AND_AUTOREPLY=1 with OVERRIDE_RECIPIENT=+16173974753. This will send all texts, regardless of the contact's phone number, to +16173974753.

We have some special handling in the code to still route texts correctly -- we append the contact's original phone number to the outgoing message (so foo sent to +16175555770 would become [+16175555770] foo), and then the autoreply will keep that intact (so it would reply with [+16175555770] foo (auto-reply)). We then parse out this tag in incoming messages and treat that message as a reply from +16175555770.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Twilio will block messages after 15 in a row go back and forth between two numbers within 15 seconds. So if you use this setting to send more than 7 outbound messages, you'll hit this limit and Twilio will stop sending messages. So the recommended flow is to switch to this config just to do a small end-to-end test with a couple recipients (and probably change DROP_MESSAGE_RATIO to 0 so you actually send all the messages).

Generating test input data

To generate a CSV with, e.g., 1000 contacts, just run:

./dev-tools/generate-test-data.py 1000 > ./sample1000.csv

This will generate 1000 contacts with 555-area-code phone numbers, black-hole email addresses, 02141 as their ZIP, and a fav_color custom field.

In your .env, add the following to make phone numbers valid from the sample input data

SUPPRESS_PHONE_VALIDATION=1

Working with a reasonable batch size for dynamic assign

The default size for batch assign is 300, but when testing you can change the batch size to a more reasonable testing number by setting in the .env file.

DYNAMIC_ASSIGN_MAX_BATCH_SIZE=10

The .env.example file includes this setting for you.

Phone number provisioning

There are two ways to provision Twilio phone numbers and Messaging Services in the Warren fork of Spoke:

• Using the campaignPhoneNumbers feature, which provisions Messaging Services for campaigns on-the-fly and adds numbers from a shared inventory. This feature allows Spoke to scale beyond the limits of a single Messaging Service (400 numbers or about 80,000 texts a day). Numbers and Messaging Services are managed by the application.

• Using the global Messaging Service set by the TWILIO_MESSAGE_SERVICE_SID env var. We also support setting a message_service_sid in organization features, but this is not used currently and may be removed in the future. The messaging service needs to be created and managed manually. See dev-tools/ for scripts to help with this.

The rest of this section describes campaignPhoneNumbers feature.

Enabling campaignPhoneNumbers

You must be an OWNER of an organization to enable the campaignPhoneNumbers. There is no UI for this but it can be done through a mutation in Graphiql:

mutation {
  enableCampaignPhoneNumbers(organizationId: "12345") {
    campaignPhoneNumbersEnabled
  }
}

The phone number inventory

campaignPhoneNumbers relies on an inventory of phone numbers managed by the Spoke application. Managed phone numbers are tracked in the twilio_phone_number table and can be in one of three states:

• AVAILABLE: available to be claimed by a new campaign
• RESERVED: claimed by an unstarted campaign. Reservations expire to prevent campaigns from holding numbers without using them.
• ASSIGNED: claimed by an active campaign and added to the Twilio Messaging Service created for that campaign.

The phone number inventory is shared by all organizations in a Spoke instance. This was desirable for Warren for President but might not be suitable for all Spoke deployments.

Campaign creation

When the campaignPhoneNumbers feature is enabled, admins will have to configure phone numbers when building a campaign. The "Phone Numbers" section in the campaign creation flow allows admins to select the area codes they want to use from the list of available phone numbers in the inventory.

This also enforces a ratio of 150 contacts per number to stay well within the recommended limit of 200 texts/day for P2P texting. A campaign cannot start until enough numbers have been reserved.

By design, an admin cannot purchase numbers or make modifications to Twilio while editing a draft campaign. Starting a campaign creates a Messaging Service and transfers already-purchased numbers to it. Once a campaign is started, the Messaging Service and phone number configuration cannot be changed.

Purchasing numbers for the inventory

To buy more numbers and make them available to campaign creators, SUPERADMINS can run a mutation in Graphiql.

Example: purchase 3 numbers in the 952 area code:

mutation {
  buyNumbers(areaCode: "952", limit: 3) {
    id
  }
}

IMPORTANT: the twilio_phone_numbers table and buy-numbers background job are not intended to be used with the global Twilio messaging service. Instead, use dev-tools/buy-numbers.js to buy numbers if you don't have campaignPhoneNumbers turned on.

Voice responses

To override the default voice response for Spoke-managed numbers set the TWILIO_VOICE_URL env var. We use a simple TwiML Bin response:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<Response>
  <Play>https://ew-spoke-public.s3.amazonaws.com/2020-01-12_DTC_Text+Incoming+Message.wav</Play>
</Response>

Sticky sender

The campaignPhoneNumbers feature was designed to avoid texting contacts with the same number from different campaigns. This solves two problems:

1. It avoids threading messages from different campaigns/volunteers on the contact's phone
2. It allows us to route texts correctly for contacts who receive messages from more than one campaign. By comparison, Spoke will route incoming messages to the campaign that texted a contact most recently when using a shared Messaging Service.

Note that phone numbers are re-used, so it is possible for a contact to receive messages from the same number from different campaigns, though it is unlikely at scale. It is not possible, however, for a number to be used by two active campaigns simultaneously, so we still manage to avoid routing problems.

License

Spoke is licensed under the MIT license.