This handles spinning up the droplets, managing the files, and tearing down the droplets with simple command line scripts. The idea is to make it less error-prone and tedious to prepare an email blast.

• You will need to have the 1Password CLI installed.
• You will need to configure the environment variables. Ensure they are loaded into your 1Password - update the references in prod.env and mongo.env accordingly.
• You will need to have the DigitalOcean CLI installed.
• You will need to auth the doctl CLI, setting the --context to fcc (the commands rely on this auth context name.)
• You will need an SSH key available in your DigitalOcean account.
• You will need the AWS CLI, which you should authenticate with SSO. Name the profile freeCodeCamp for this tool to work correctly.

• The database query uses our pre-existing script.
• The email blast uses our SES CLI tool

You'll need to start by configuring the environment variables for the email blast servers themselves. Copy the mongo.env from the templates directory to the data directory and fill in the values. Add an emailBody.txt file to the data directory and fill in the email body.

To run the database query, you'll first need a droplet to do so. Typically you want to run the DB query the day before the blast, to avoid delaying your send. Run pnpm db:setup to spin up the droplet.

Running pnpm db:files will load the necessary files to the query droplet, and give you instructions for running the query.

Once the database query is complete, run pnpm db:teardown to download the email list and automatically destroy the droplet to save costs.

Run pnpm emails:setup to spin up new droplets. The script will automatically grant access to the configured ssh key, and assign the droplets to the configured project.

Run pnpm emails:files to initialise the files on the droplets. This will copy the emails.env and emailBody.txt files to the droplets. This will pull down the full email list from the query, and batch it into files of equivalent size (or as close as it can), one for each droplet. It will push the email lists up to each droplet. Then you can ssh into each droplet and start the sending process.

When the blast is complete, run pnpm emails:teardown to destroy the droplets, and pnpm scripts:clean to remove your sensitive local files. This minimises the risk that private data may be exposed.

When a spam report for our email blast comes back through AWS, you need to prevent further emails to that address. Run pnpm scripts:block <email> to add the account to the suppression list and unsubscribe them from the newsletter in the database.