Griddler

Receive emails in your Rails app

Griddler is a Rails engine (full plugin) that provides an endpoint for the SendGrid parse api, Cloudmailin parse api or Postmark parse api that hands off a built email object to a class implemented by you.

Tutorials

SendGrid has done a great tutorial on integrating Griddler with your application.
And of course, view our own blog post on the subject over at Giant Robots.

Installation

Add griddler to your application's Gemfile and run bundle install:

gem 'griddler'

Griddler comes with a default endpoint that will be displayed at the bottom of the output of rake routes. If there is a previously defined route that matches /email_processor -- or you would like to rename the matched path -- you may add the route to the desired position in routes.rb with the following:

post '/email_processor' => 'griddler/emails#create'

Defaults

By default Griddler will look for a class to be created in your application called EmailProcessor with a class method implemented, named process, taking in one argument (presumably email). For example, in ./lib/email_processor.rb:

class EmailProcessor
  def self.process(email)
    # all of your application-specific code here - creating models,
    # processing reports, etc
  end
end

The contents of the email object passed into your process method is an object that responds to:

.to
.from
.subject
.body
.raw_body
.attachments
.headers
.raw_headers

Each of those has some sensible defaults.

.from, .raw_body, .raw_headers, and .subject will contain the obvious values found in the email, the raw values from those fields.

.body will contain the full contents of the email body unless there is a line in the email containing the string -- Reply ABOVE THIS LINE --. In that case .body will contain everything before that line.

.to will contain all of the text before the email's "@" character. We've found that this is the most often used portion of the email address and consider it to be the token we'll key off of for interaction with our application.

.attachments will contain an array of attachments as multipart/form-data files which can be passed off to attachment libraries like Carrierwave or Paperclip.

.headers will contain a hash of header names and values as parsed by the Mail gem. Headers will only be parsed if the adapter supports a headers option.

Configuration Options

An initializer can be created to control some of the options in Griddler. Defaults are shown below with sample overrides following. In config/initializer/griddler.rb:

Griddler.configure do |config|
  config.processor_class = EmailProcessor # MyEmailProcessor
  config.to = :token # :raw, :email, :hash
  # :raw    => 'AppName <[email protected]>'
  # :email  => '[email protected]'
  # :token  => 's13.6b2d13dc6a1d33db7644'
  # :hash   => { raw: '', email: '', token: '', host: '' }
  config.reply_delimiter = '-- REPLY ABOVE THIS LINE --'
  config.email_service = :sendgrid
end

config.processor_class is the class Griddler will use to handle your incoming emails.
config.reply_delimiter is the string searched for that will split your body.
config.to is the format of the returned value for the :to key in the email object. :hash will return all options within a -- (surprise!) -- hash.
config.email_service tells Griddler which email service you are using. The supported email service options are :sendgrid (the default), :cloudmailin (expects multipart format) and :postmark.

Testing In Your App

You may want to create a factory for when testing the integration of Griddler into your application. If you're using factory_girl this can be accomplished with the following sample factory.

factory :email, class: OpenStruct do
  to 'email-token'
  from '[email protected]'
  subject 'email subject'
  body 'Hello!'
  attachments {[]}

  trait :with_attachment do
    attachments {[
      ActionDispatch::Http::UploadedFile.new({
        filename: 'img.png',
        type: 'image/png',
        tempfile: File.new("#{File.expand_path File.dirname(__FILE__)}/fixtures/img.png")
      })
    ]}
  end
end

Bear in mind, if you plan on using the :with_attachment trait, that this example assumes your factories are in spec/factories.rb and you have an image file in spec/fixtures/.

To use it in your test(s) just build with email = build(:email) or email = build(:email, :with_attachment).

Adapters

Griddler::Email expects certain parameters to be in place for proper parsing to occur. When writing an adapter, ensure that the normalized_params method of your adapter returns a hash with these keys:

:to The recipient field
:from The sender field
:subject Email subject
:text The text body of the email
:html The html body of the email, nil or empty string if not present
:attachments (can be an empty array) Array of attachments to the email
:headers (optional) The raw headers of the email
:charsets (optional) A JSON string containing the character sets of the fields extracted from the message

More Information

Credits

Griddler was written by Caleb Thompson and Joel Oliveira.

Large portions of the codebase were extracted from thoughtbot's Trajectory.

The names and logos for thoughtbot are trademarks of thoughtbot, inc.