Seevooplay

Seevooplay is a Django app for online invitations and RSVPs. Think of it as your personal, self-hosted version of Partiful, Evite, Facebook Invitations, and the like. Throwing a party? Don't give all your friends' phone numbers to Partiful, don't give their email addresses to Evite, don't expect them to be on Facebook. Embrace the indieweb, kick the corporate middleman to the curb, and let Seevooplay send email invitations and collect responses for you! That's the pitch, anyway.

Seevooplay is crafted for personal use; it is not architected for scale. It is directly inspired by DaVite, a 2000-line Perl script last updated in 2004 -- a very cool and useful hack for its time, but wholly inappropriate for use on the modern web. Seevooplay aims to solve the same problems DaVite did, in much the same way, but with modern, maintainable, extensible code, atop the rock-solid foundation of Python and Django.

The owner of a Seevooplay instance interacts with Seevooplay mainly through Django's admin. Invitees generally interact with a single page, whose default template and styling is deliberately minimalistic and intended to be customized. Through the magic of the CSS cascade and Django template overriding, you can make what your guests see as gorgeous (or as ugly) as you like.

Your invitees will receive emails containing personalized links back to your Seevooplay instance. They won't have to create any sort of account (or log in) to RSVP to your event; a UUID in their link tells Seevooplay who they are. This means that forwarded links are problematic: If Alice forwards her invitation to Bob, Bob can RSVP as Alice. In other words, from a security standpoint, Seevooplay is about as naive as it gets. For the casual, personal use cases Seevooplay is designed for, however, this model works. If it spooks you, your parties are much higher stakes than mine, and you should look for a different solution. :)

Seevooplay is free software, licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, Version 3. See the included COPYING file for details.

For slightly more context, read the original release announcement.

Installation

Seevooplay can be run as a standalone project, or integrated with an existing Django project.

Run as a standalone project

There is not (yet) a containerized distribution of Seevooplay, so there is a small bit of setup work to do if you'd like to selfhost a standalone instance. As of version 2.0, Seevooplay is a uv project. If you don't have uv, grab a copy before proceeding.

1. Download the Seevooplay distribution and extract to a folder, or git clone it.
2. Copy config/settings/local.py.example to config/settings/local.py and edit local.py to match your server's particulars.
3. cd into Seevooplay's directory and use uv to fetch Seevooplay's dependencies and set up its virtual environment:

uv sync
uv run ./manage.py migrate
uv run ./manage.py collectstatic

4. Now do uv run ./manage.py sendtestemail to ensure your setup can send mail.
5. Now uv run ./manage.py createsuperuser will walk you through creating a superuser.
6. Fire up the Django development server with uv run ./manage.py runserver if you are test-driving Seevooplay. In production, do not use the development server. Instead, serve the app with gunicorn (included) behind a reverse proxy like nginx or caddy: uv run gunicorn config.wsgi.
7. In your browser, navigate to http://yourdomain/admin and log in with your superuser credentials to poke around and create your first event in Seevooplay. As long as you remain logged in, you can view your first event at http://yourdomain/rsvp/1.

Integrate with an existing Django project

1. Add Seevooplay to your project with uv add seevooplay.
2. Add to INSTALLED_APPS in your settings.py:

'djrichtextfield',  # required for seevooplay
'seevooplay',

3. Add settings for django-richtextfield in your settings.py. See django-richtextfield's docs for details, or copy the DJRICHTEXTFIELD_CONFIG stanza from Seevooplay's config/settings/base.py.
4. In your main urls.py, include Seevooplay's URLs (make sure include is imported from django.urls):

path('seevooplay/', include('seevooplay.urls')),

This puts Seevooplay's routes under /seevooplay/, giving you paths like /seevooplay/rsvp/<event_id>/.

5. From within your project's virtual environment:

uv run ./manage.py migrate
uv run ./manage.py collectstatic

6. There should now be a Seevooplay section in your project's admin, where you can start kicking the tires.

New in 2.x

• Seevooplay 2.x replaces conventional UUIDs with shortuuids, resulting in shorter invite URLs for your guests. Existing UUIDs are kept in the database if you are upgrading, so active invitation links will not break. (The legacy_uuid field will go away in a future version of Seevooplay.)
• Seevooplay no longer emails invitees immediately when you save your event. Instead, on save, the admin user is presented with the option to email uninvited guests. Do it then and there, or wait for later -- your choice.
• Event pages now sport an "Add to Calendar" button that does what your guests might expect.
• Seevooplay has been internationalized! The author is (regretfully) a monolingual Californian, so at the moment, the app is English-only out of the box, but it now follows standard Django practices for internationalization and localization. If you speak another language and would like to contribute a translation, please open a pull request or get in touch if you need guidance.
• The app now includes a comprehensive suite of pytest-driven tests.

Upgrading from 1.x

• Standalone installations: You should be able to simply upgrade the codebase, run migrations, and re-launch the app.
• Integrations with other Django projects: Update your seevooplay depdendency, run migrations, and edit your main urls.py as described above -- Seevooplay 2.x now requires only one entry in that file.

What Seevooplay Lacks

• The ability to message invitees using anything other than email. Seevooplay cannot send text messages to phone numbers, for instance, for the simple reason that there is no cost-free (or even low-cost, hassle-free) way for a self-hosted application to do that, due to carrier restrictions targeting spam and abuse.
• HTML emails. Plain text emails don't bother me much, but perhaps I'll do these someday.
• Comprehensive documentation. If anyone other than me ends up using this, the docs will get better. In the meantime, if you try using Seevooplay and run into trouble, please open an issue on GitHub. I will help if I can.
• Perfection. This software was crafted to scratch a personal itch. It almost certainly has bugs. If you discover one, or you have a suggestion for improving the code, please open an issue on GitHub.
• 'Add to calendar' functionality. This is probably something I'll hack on at some point. (Done in 2.0!)
• Tests. Another thing I'm likely to throw together at some point. (Done in 2.0!)
• Internationalization. I welcome pull requests to change this. (Done in 2.0!)

LLM Disclosure

Seevooplay is not a vibe-coded app. The 1.x series was written entirely "by hand" prior to the availability of LLM-driven coding tools. LLM-based tooling was used in the creation of the 2.x series, mostly to aid with the UUID to shortuuid transition (which proved unexpectedly complicated for sqlite installations), to craft the test suite, and to internationalize the app. Every line of code generated by LLM-based tooling was reviewed (and often edited) by Seevooplay's author, who should be blamed for (and alerted to!) any bugs that remain.