Maily

Stop to delivery emails every time you change it!

Maily is a Rails Engine to preview, follow up, test and edit the emails of your applications in the browser.

Features:

Mountable engine
Visual preview in the browser (attachments as well)
Template edition
Email delivery
Features configurables per environment
Customizable parent controller (define permissions in your own controller)
Minimalistic interface (thanks to @gnatok)
Easy way (named hooks) to define data for emails
Generator to handle a comfortable installation

Installation

Add this line to you Gemfile:

gem 'maily'

Run generator:

rails g maily:install

This installator makes some tasks for you:

Mounts the engine (to /maily by default) in your routes
Adds an initializer (into config/initializers/maily.rb) to customize some settings
Adds a file (into lib/maily_hooks.rb) to define hooks

Initializer

You should configure Maily via this initializer. You can set these options per environment:

  Maily.enabled = ENV['MAILY_ENABLED']

This is a sample of file with the full list of options:

# config/initializers/maily.rb
Maily.setup do |config|
  # Enable/disable engine
  # config.enabled = Rails.env.production? ? false : true

  # Allow to edit templates
  # config.allow_edition = Rails.env.production? ? false : true

  # Allow deliveries
  # config.allow_delivery = Rails.env.production? ? false : true

  # Define I18n available locales
  # config.available_locales = [:en, :es, :pt, :fr]

  # Define parent controller. Allow to run engine under a custom controller
  # config.base_controller = 'AdminController'
end

Hooks

Most of emails need to populate data to consume it and do intersting things. Hooks are used to define this data with a little DSL. Example:

# lib/maily_hooks.rb
user = User.new(email: '[email protected]')
comment = Struct.new(:body).new('Lorem ipsum') # stub way
service = Service.new(price: '100USD')

Maily.hooks_for('Notifier') do |mailer|
  mailer.register_hook(:welcome, user, template_path: 'users')
  mailer.register_hook(:new_comment, user, comment)
end

Maily.hooks_for('PaymentNotifier') do |mailer|
  mailer.register_hook(:invoice, user, service)
end

Note that you are able to override template_path like can be done in Rails. You must pass this option as a hash and last argument:

Maily.hooks_for('YourMailerClass') do |mailer|
  mailer.register_hook(:your_mail, template_path: 'notifications')
end

Notes

Rails 4.1 introduced a built-in mechanism to preview the application emails. It is in fact a port of basecamp/mail_view gem to the core.