Officially Unsupported

From ActionMailer 3.0 and above, inline attachments have been made very simple and are built into Rails. They're not quite as simple as they were with inline_attachments, but see here for how to do them.


Inline Attachment

This package adds full support for embedding inline images into your HTML emails through ActionMailer.

Installation

As a Gem

To perform a system wide installation:

gem install inline_attachment

To use inline_attachment in your project, add the following line to your project's config/environment.rb:

config.gem 'inline_attachment'

As a Rails Plugin

Use this to install as a plugin in a Ruby on Rails app:

$ script/plugin install git://github.com/smathy/inline_attachment.git

As a Rails Plugin (using git submodules)

Use this if you prefer the idea of being able to easily switch between using edge or a tagged version:

$ git submodule add git://github.com/smathy/inline_attachment.git vendor/plugins/inline_attachment

Usage

I've rewritten most of Edmond's great work in this version. I now override path_to_image instead of image_tag because a big reason for all the Rails2 breakages was because image_tag was basically reproduced in previous versions, so broke when that method changed.

Now we override the very simple path_to_image, and most importantly we really just add our own stuff for ActionMailer templates, and resort to the existing code for everything else.

I've also integrated in with the new implicit multipart stuff. So now, there is so little code required!

notifier.rb

class Notifier < ActionMailer::Base
  def 
    recipients %q{"Testing IA" <[email protected]>}
      from       %q{"Mr Tester" <[email protected]>}
      subject "Here's a funky test"
  end
end

Oh yeah baby! Read it and weep! So how's this work? Well, you'll need your templates named properly - see the Multipart email section of the ActionMailer::Base docs.

signup.text.plain.erb

Your username is: <%= @username %>

signup.text.html.erb

<html><head><title>Signup Notification</title></head><body>
  <%= image_tag "logo.png" %>
    <p>Your username is: <%=h @username %>
</body></html>

That's it! InlineAttachment will look for #{RAILS_ROOT}/public/images/logo.png and will do the right thing and embed it inline into the HTML version of the email. ActionMailer will do the right thing and offer the recipient both the text/plain and text/html parts as alternatives.

Note the filenames include the (unusual) major.minor MIME type, look above at the filenames closely.

Note, that you should still be able to use this in the 0.3.0 way if you have code that uses that. But there were a lot of alternatives, and the examples in here didn't show a crucial step of shuffling the parts around to be sure that the image parts came after the html.

You can also do the old manual method if you want.

Contributors

  • Jason King (JasonKing)
  • Matt Griffin (betamatt) - file:// and chaining cleanup
  • Logan Raarup (logandk) - pluginified
  • Jeffrey Damick (jdamick) - bugfix