Preview plain text and html mail templates in your browser without redelivering it every time you make a change.
Inspired by MailView: https://github.com/37signals/mail_view/ However, implemented as a Rails engine, with layouts and multiple mailers support.
Compatible with Rails version >= 3 only.
Since most emails do something interesting with database data, you'll need to write some scenarios to load messages with fake data. Its similar to writing mailer unit tests but you see a visual representation of the output instead.
class Notifier < ActionMailer::Base
def invitation(inviter, invitee)
# ...
end
def welcome(user)
# ...
end
class Preview
# Pull data from existing fixtures
def invitation
account = Account.first
inviter, invitee = account.users[0, 2]
Notifier.invitation(inviter, invitee)
end
# Factory-like pattern
def welcome
user = User.create!
mail = Notifier.welcome(user)
user.destory
mail
end
end
end
The methods must return a Mail object.
Since this is a Rails engine, it can be configured in an initializer:
In config/initializers/rails_email_preview.rb
require 'rails_email_preview'
RailsEmailPreview.setup do |config|
config.preview_classes = [ Notifier::Preview ]
end
# If you want to render it within the application layout, uncomment the following lines:
# Rails.application.config.to_prepare do
# RailsEmailPreview::ApplicationController.layout "application"
# end
# Note that if you do use it with your main_app layout, all the main_app URLs must be generated explicitly
# E.g. you would need to change links like login_url to main_app.login_url
Routing is very simple
In config/routes.rb add:
if Rails.env.development?
mount RailsEmailPreview::Engine, :at => 'email_preview' # You can choose any URL here
end
To get the url of RailsEmailPreview in your main app you can call rails_email_preview.root_url
Premailer automatically translates standard CSS rules into old-school inline styles. Integration can be done by using the before_render hook:
RailsEmailPreview.setup do |config|
config.before_render do |message|
ActionMailer::InlineCssHook.delivering_email(message)
end
end
If you're your running Rails 3, you may consider using premailer-rails. It will inline CSS, automatically create plain text emails, and requires almost no configuration.
RailsEmailPreview.setup do |config|
config.before_render do |message|
Premailer::Rails::Hook.delivering_email(message)
end
end
As this is a rails engine, you can ovveride any of the views, or make them use your layout.
This project rocks and uses MIT-LICENSE.