Helpy Pro

Safeguard your customer support data without compromising on providing a heroic customer support experience. Helpy Pro is the self-hosted customer support platform engineered for companies that are serious about security, privacy, and compliance. Designed for on-premise and private instance deployments, Helpy Pro lets you avoid vendor lock-in, own your data, and integrate with the tools you already use to keep your data safe.

About the Droplet

This DigitalOcean marketplace droplet gives you instant access to the free tier of Helpy Pro. This includes the core open source ticketing features for 3 agents.

Core Features

• Convert incoming emails to support tickets which appear in your agent inbox
• Provide a customized help center where customers can submit or track previous requests
• Organize tickets with tagging and team groups. Assign tickets to agents and teams.
• Quickly locate tickets using the integrated ticket search
• Manage and organize customer tickets with Merge and Split
• Manage your customer contacts with the integrated customer CRM
• Support for 20+ languages

Helpy Pro can be upgraded to a full version with the addition of a license code, which unlocks features designed for scaling businesses, including:

• Empower your customers to solve their own problems with a searchable knowledgebase
• Stay organized with ticketing that includes custom views, queues, and SLAs
• Gain operational efficiencies with auto-assignment, real-time notifications, and automation
• Create and customize ticket creation forms for different reasons and teams
• Advanced reporting to help you optimize your content and operations
• Live chat and Knowledgebase widget to bring help directly to your customers in product
• A full API for building deep integrations into your existing application stack

Security, Privacy and Compliance

• Compliance features to manage customer right to deletion requests for GDPR, CCPA, WPA, etc.
• An open-source codebase that you can review and contribute to
• Host on any public or private cloud, even on-premise in your own datacenter
• Keep control of and maintain ownership of your data at all times
• Avoid compliance chain hell with no third party dependencies
• Rest assured no one is “looking over your shoulder”
• Set and follow internal data retention policies, including backups
• Define team-based permissions and roles

Software Included

Creating an App using the Control Panel

Click the Deploy to DigitalOcean button to create a Droplet based on this 1-Click App. If you aren’t logged in, this link will prompt you to log in with your DigitalOcean account.

Creating an App using the API

In addition to creating a Droplet from the Helpy Pro 1-Click App using the control panel, you can also use the DigitalOcean API. As an example, to create a 4GB Helpy Pro Droplet in the SFO2 region, you can use the following curl command. You need to either save your API access token) to an environment variable or substitute it in the command below.

curl -X POST -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
         -H 'Authorization: Bearer '$TOKEN'' -d \
        '{"name":"choose_a_name","region":"sfo2","size":"s-2vcpu-4gb","image": "helpyio-helpypro-18-04"}' \
        "https://api.digitalocean.com/v2/droplets"

Getting Started After Deploying Helpy Pro

Congratulations on setting up your own private instance of Helpy Pro. This instance includes the free version of Helpy Pro that can be upgraded with a purchased license key.

IMPORTANT: When you create the droplet, it can take a couple minutes to come up the first time as the latest and greatest version is downloaded and automatically installed for you.

Logging in to Helpy the first time:

The first time you log into the software, you will be prompted to create your master administrator user and provide a secure password for future access.

Logging into the droplet and using the CLI:

On Digital Ocean, initial access is by SSH using the root user. To login, use

Ssh [email protected]

You can interact with Helpy by using the ‘helpy’ CLI (command

line interface). Here are a couple useful commands to

help you get going:

sudo helpy config #shows the current configuration
sudo helpy scale web=1 worker=1 #daemonize the helpy process
sudo helpy restart #restarts the helpy service

Performance tuning: You may need to adjust the following

variables to fit your instance size:

Set the amount of ram allocated for the Helpy Service:

sudo helpy config:set PWK_RAM=RAM_IN_MEGABYTES

Set the number of workers:

sudo helpy config:set PUMA_CONCURRENCY=n

Set the number of threads per worker:

sudo helpy config:set PUMA_THREADS=n

Upgrading

Helpy runs as a apt package under the helpy user account.

Upgrading is super easy! To update to the latest version,

all you need to do is:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade && sudo helpy
run rake db:migrate