email_preview

preview emails within your web browser

Features

preview HTML or plain text emails from within your web browser
emails are reloaded with each view so you can tweak/save/refresh for instant verification
integrates perfectly with existing test fixtures
convenient form to send any email preview directly to your real inbox
only exposes routes in development mode to prevent leaking into production mode

Installation

gem 'email_preview'

Usage

# config/initializers/email_preview.rb
# basic example for previewing an email built manually
EmailPreview.register 'simple example email' do
  Mail.new do
    to '[email protected]'
    from '[email protected]'
    body 'check this out'
  end
end

EmailPreview.register 'multipart email (html + text)' do
  Mail.new do
    from '[email protected]'
    to '[email protected]'
    subject 'This is a test email'

    text_part do
      body 'This is plain text'
    end
    html_part do
      content_type 'text/html; charset=UTF-8'
      body '<h1>This is HTML</h1>'
    end
  end
end

# Rails ActionMailer Example
# each execution is wrapped with a transaction and 
# rolled back after completed so there are no side-effects
EmailPreview.register 'Rails ActionMailer User activation email' do
  u = User.create :email => '[email protected]'
  UserMailer.activation(u)
end

browse the list of registered emails and preview them in your browser at: http://localhost:3000/email_preview

screenshot

When you have lots of emails in your app, it's useful to group them into related topics.

# config/initializers/email_preview.rb
EmailPreview.register 'User activation', :category => :user do
  u = User.new :email => '[email protected]'
  UserMailer.activation(u)
end
EmailPreview.register 'Blog posted', :category => :blog do
  b = Blog.new :title => 'foo'
  BlogMailer.posted(b)
end

(optional) expose to production environment

By default the email_preview feature is only available in development mode.
To make it available to other environments use:

# config/initializers/email_preview.rb
EmailPreview.allowed_environments << 'production'

(optional) set a different delivery method in development

By default emails are delivered with the delivery_method configured for your application. You can override this so that if you use :test for development you can still deliver mails when you use the send test email form.

# config/environments/development.rb
EmailPreview.delivery_method = :smtp # or :sendmail, etc
ActionMailer::Base.smtp_settings = {:port => 12345} # additional configuration is optional

Contributing

Fork the project
Fix the issue
Add unit tests
Submit pull request on github

See CONTRIBUTORS.txt for list of project contributors