benjamin-hull / letter_opener

Preview mail in the browser instead of sending.

Letter Opener <img src=“https://secure.travis-ci.org/ryanb/letter_opener.png” />¶ ↑

Preview email in the default browser instead of sending it. This means you do not need to set up email delivery in your development environment, and you no longer need to worry about accidentally sending a test email to someone else’s address.

Rails Setup¶ ↑

First add the gem to your development environment and run the bundle command to install it.

gem "letter_opener", :group => :development

Then set the delivery method in config/environments/development.rb

config.action_mailer.delivery_method = :letter_opener

Now any email will pop up in your browser instead of being sent. The messages are stored in tmp/letter_opener. If you want to change application that will be used to open your emails you should override LAUNCHY_APPLICATION environment variable or set Launchy.application in the initializer.

Rails Configuration¶ ↑

To override the location for message storage, set the LETTER_OPENER_LOCATION environment variable.

You can set LETTER_OPENER_MESSAGE_TEMPLATE environment variable to set the template for previewing mails. The built-in templates are:

• default The default type displays the message headers, including subject, sender and recipient, and any attachments.

• message_only Renders only the message body, without any metadata or extra containers or styling.

Set LETTER_OPENER_MESSAGE_TEMPLATE to a path to a template file to supply your own template.

For Rails 2.3.x support¶ ↑

There is a fork that add support for Rails 2.3.x, in order to use that or just check it out you should go to github.com/cavi21/letter_opener

Non Rails Setup¶ ↑

If you aren’t using Rails, this can be easily set up with the Mail gem. Just set the delivery method when configuring Mail and specify a location.

require "letter_opener"
Mail.defaults do
  delivery_method LetterOpener::DeliveryMethod, :location => File.expand_path('../tmp/letter_opener', __FILE__)
end

The method is similar if you’re using the Pony gem:

require "letter_opener"
Pony.options = {
  :via => LetterOpener::DeliveryMethod,
  :via_options => {:location => File.expand_path('../tmp/letter_opener', __FILE__)}
}

Alternatively, if you are using ActionMailer directly (without Rails) you will need to add the delivery method.

require "letter_opener"
ActionMailer::Base.add_delivery_method :letter_opener, LetterOpener::DeliveryMethod, :location => File.expand_path('../tmp/letter_opener', __FILE__)
ActionMailer::Base.delivery_method = :letter_opener

Remote Alternatives¶ ↑

Letter Opener uses Launchy to open sent mail in the browser. This assumes the Ruby process is running on the local development machine. If you are using a separate staging server or VM this will not work. In that case consider using Mailtrap or MailCatcher.

In order to keep this project simple, I don’t have plans to turn it into a Rails engine with an interface for browsing the sent mail but there is a gem you can use for that.

Development & Feedback¶ ↑

Questions or problems? Please use the issue tracker. If you would like to contribute to this project, fork this repository and run bundle and rake to run the tests. Pull requests appreciated.

Special thanks to the mail_view gem for inspiring this project and for their mail template. Also thanks to Vasiliy Ermolovich for helping manage this project.