For a small PHP project, I created a Docker container with an Apache and PHP in order to ease local development and setup. But that was not enough because my PHP application also sends mails and I wanted to test this feature locally as well. That’s why I needed a local SMTP server for testing and integrate it into my current Docker composition. In this brief post, I show you how I achieved this.
If our PHP application now calls mail() it will trigger mhsendmail which in turn sends the mail to MailHog.
The mail should show up in the MailHog UI under http://localhost/. We don’t even have to refresh the browser!
Moreover, we can consume the HTTP API of MailHog in our tests and verify that our PHP application has sent a mail correctly. The URL http://localhost/api/v2/messages is a good starting point. It returns something like this:
