Preview email in the default browser instead of sending it. This means you do not need to set up email delivery in your development environment, and you no longer need to worry about accidentally sending a test email to someone else’s address.
First add the gem to your development environment and run the bundle command to install it.
gem "letter_opener", :group => :development
Then set the delivery method in config/environments/development.rb
config.action_mailer.delivery_method = :letter_opener
Now any email will pop up in your browser instead of being sent. The messages are stored in tmp/letter_opener. If you want to change application that will be used to open your emails you should override LAUNCHY_APPLICATION environment variable or set Launchy.application in the initializer.
There is a fork that add support for Rails 2.3.x, in order to use that or just check it out you should go to github.com/cavi21/letter_opener
If you aren’t using Rails, this can be easily set up with the Mail gem. Just set the delivery method when configuring Mail and specify a location.
require "letter_opener" Mail.defaults do delivery_method LetterOpener::DeliveryMethod, :location => File.expand_path('../tmp/letter_opener', __FILE__) end
The method is similar if you’re using the Pony gem:
require "letter_opener" Pony.options = { :via => LetterOpener::DeliveryMethod, :via_options => {:location => File.expand_path('../tmp/letter_opener', __FILE__)} }
Alternatively, if you are using ActionMailer directly (without Rails) you will need to add the delivery method.
require "letter_opener" ActionMailer::Base.add_delivery_method :letter_opener, LetterOpener::DeliveryMethod, :location => File.expand_path('../tmp/letter_opener', __FILE__) ActionMailer::Base.delivery_method = :letter_opener
Letter Opener uses Launchy to open sent mail in the browser. This assumes the Ruby process is running on the local development machine. If you are using a separate staging server or VM this will not work. In that case consider using Mailtrap or MailCatcher.
In order to keep this project simple, I don’t have plans to turn it into a Rails engine with an interface for browsing the sent mail but there is a gem you can use for that.
Questions or problems? Please use the issue tracker. If you would like to contribute to this project, fork this repository and run bundle and rake to run the tests. Pull requests appreciated.
Special thanks to the mail_view gem for inspiring this project and for their mail template. Also thanks to Vasiliy Ermolovich for helping manage this project.