Ruby on Rails

ActionMailer

Introduction#

Action Mailer allows you to send emails from your application using mailer classes and views. Mailers work very similarly to controllers. They inherit from ActionMailer::Base and live in app/mailers, and they have associated views that appear in app/views.

Remarks#

It is advisable to process the sending of email asynchronously so as not to tie up your web server. This can be done through various services such as delayed_job.

Basic Mailer

This example uses four different files:

  • The User model
  • The User mailer
  • The html template for the email
  • The plain-text template for the email

In this case, the user model calls the approved method in the mailer and passes the post that has been approved (the approved method in the model may be called by a callback, from a controller method, etc). Then, the mailer generates the email from either the html or plain-text template using the information from the passed-in post (e.g. the title). By default, the mailer uses the template with the same name as the method in the mailer (which is why both the mailer method and the templates have the name ‘approved’).

user_mailer.rb

class UserMailer < ActionMailer::Base
  default from: "donotreply@example.com"

  def approved(post)
      @title = post.title
      @user = post.user
      mail(to: @user.email, subject: "Your Post was Approved!")
  end
end

user.rb

def approved(post)
    UserMailer.approved(post)
end

approved.html.erb

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "https://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
    <head>
      <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
      <title>Post Approved</title>
    </head>
    <body>
        <h2>Congrats <%= @user.name %>! Your post (#<%= @title %>) has been approved!</h2>
        <p>We look forward to your future posts!</p>
    </body>
</html>

approved.text.erb

Congrats <%= @user.name %>! Your post (#<%= @title %>) has been approved!
We look forward to your future posts!

Generating a new mailer

To generate a new mailer, enter the following command

rails generate mailer PostMailer

This will generate a blank template file in app/mailers/post_mailer.rb named PostMailer

class PostMailer < ApplicationMailer
end

Two layout files will also be generated for the email view, one for the html format and one for the text format.

If you prefer not to use the generator, you can create your own mailers. Make sure they inherit from ActionMailer::Base

Adding Attachments

ActionMailer also allows attaching files.

attachments['filename.jpg'] = File.read('/path/to/filename.jpg')

By default, attachments will be encoded with Base64. To change this, you can add a hash to the attachments method.

attachments['filename.jpg'] = {
  mime_type: 'application/gzip',
  encoding: 'SpecialEncoding',
  content: encoded_content
}

You can also add inline attachments

attachments.inline['image.jpg'] = File.read('/path/to/image.jpg')

ActionMailer Callbacks

ActionMailer supports three callbacks

  • before_action
  • after_action
  • around_action

Provide these in your Mailer class

class UserMailer < ApplicationMailer
  after_action :set_delivery_options, :prevent_delivery_to_guests, :set_business_headers

Then create these methods under the private keyword

private
  def set_delivery_options
  end

  def prevent_delivery_to_guests
  end

  def set_business_headers
  end
end

Generate a Scheduled Newsletter

Create the Newsletter model:

  rails g model Newsletter name:string email:string

  subl app/models/newsletter.rb

  validates :name, presence: true
  validates :email, presence: true

Create the Newsletter controller:

  rails g controller Newsletters create
  
  class NewslettersController < ApplicationController
    skip_before_action :authenticate_user!
    before_action :set_newsletter, only: [:destroy]

    def create
      @newsletter = Newsletter.create(newsletter_params)
      if @newsletter.save
        redirect_to blog_index_path
      else
        redirect_to root_path
      end
    end

    private

      def set_newsletter
        @newsletter = Newsletter.find(params[:id])
      end

      def newsletter_params
        params.require(:newsletter).permit(:name, :email)
      end

  end

After that, change the create.html.erb view to the nex name. We will convert this file to and partial view which will be stored inside the Footer. The name will be _form.html.erb.

Change name file from: To:
app/views/newsletters/create.html.erb app/views/newsletters/_form.html.erb

After that set the routes:

  subl app/config/routes.rb
    
  resources :newsletters

Later on, we need to set the form we will use to save each mail:

  subl app/views/newsletters/_form.html.erb

  <%= form_for (Newsletter.new) do |f| %>
    <div class="col-md-12" style="margin: 0 auto; padding: 0;">
      <div class="col-md-6" style="padding: 0;">
        <%= f.text_field :name, class: 'form-control', placeholder:'Nombre' %>
      </div>
      <div class="col-md-6" style="padding: 0;">
        <%= f.text_field :email, class: 'form-control', placeholder:'Email' %>
      </div>
    </div>
    <div class="col-md-12" style="margin: 0 auto; padding:0;">
      <%= f.submit class:"col-md-12 tran3s s-color-bg hvr-shutter-out-horizontal", style:'border: none; color: white; cursor: pointer; margin: 0.5em auto; padding: 0.75em; width: 100%;' %>
    </div>
  <% end %>

And after that, insert on the footer:

  subl app/views/layouts/_footer.html.erb

  <%= render 'newsletters/form' %>

Now, install the -letter_opener- to can 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.

  subl your_project/Gemfile

  gem "letter_opener", :group => :development

Then set the delivery method in the Development Environment:

  subl your_project/app/config/environments/development.rb

  config.action_mailer.delivery_method = :letter_opener

Now, create an Mailer Structure to manage the whole mailers which we will work. In terminal

  rails generate mailer UserMailer newsletter_mailer

And inside the UserMailer, we have to create a method called Newsletter Mailer which will be created to contain inside on the lastest blog post and will be fired with a rake action. We will assume that you had a blog structure created before.

subl your_project/app/mailers/user_mailer.rb

class UserMailer < ApplicationMailer
  default from: 'your_gmail_account@gmail.com'

  
  def newsletter_mailer
    @newsletter = Newsletter.all
    @post = Post.last(3)
    emails = @newsletter.collect(&:email).join(", ")
    mail(to: emails, subject: "Hi, this is a test mail.")
  end
  
end

After that, create the Mailer Template:

subl your_project/app/views/user_mailer/newsletter_mailer.html.erb

<p> Dear Followers: </p>
<p> Those are the lastest entries to our blog. We invite you to read and share everything we did on this week. </p>

<br/>
<table>
<% @post.each do |post| %>
  <%#= link_to blog_url(post) do %>
      <tr style="display:flex; float:left; clear:both;">
        <td style="display:flex; float:left; clear:both; height: 80px; width: 100px;">
          <% if post.cover_image.present? %>
            <%= image_tag post.cover_image.fullsize.url, class:"principal-home-image-slider" %>
          <%# else %>
            <%#= image_tag 'https://your_site_project.com' + post.cover_video, class:"principal-home-image-slider" %>
            <%#= raw(video_embed(post.cover_video)) %>
          <% end %>
        </td>
        <td>
          <h3>
            <%= link_to post.title, :controller => "blog", :action => "show", :only_path => false, :id => post.id %>
          </h3>
          <p><%= post.subtitle %></p>
        </td>
        <td style="display:flex; float:left; clear:both;">
           
        </td>
      </tr>
  <%# end %>
<% end %>
</table>

Since we want to send the email as a separate process, let’s create a Rake task to fire off the email. Add a new file called email_tasks.rake to lib/tasks directory of your Rails application:

touch lib/taks/email_tasks.rake

desc 'weekly newsletter email'
task weekly_newsletter_email: :environment do
  UserMailer.newsletter_mailer.deliver!
end

The send_digest_email: :environment means to load the Rails environment before running the task, so you can access the application classes (like UserMailer) within the task.

Now, running the command rake -T will list the newly created Rake task. Test everything works by running the task and checking whether the email is sent or not.

To test if the mailer method works, run the rake command:

  rake weekly_newsletter_email

At this point, we have a working rake task which can be scheduled using crontab. So we will install the Whenever Gem which is used to provide a clear syntax for writing and deploying cron jobs.

subl your_project/Gemfile
  
  gem 'whenever', require: false

After that, run the next command to create an initial config/schedule.rb file for you (as long as the config folder is already present in your project).

  wheneverize .

  [add] writing `./config/schedule.rb'
  [done] wheneverized!

Now, inside the schedule file, we have to create our CRON JOB and call the mailer method inside determining the CRON JOB to operate some tasks without assistance and in a selected range of time. You can use different types of syntax as is explained on this link.

subl your_project/config/schedule.rb

every 1.day, :at => '4:30 am' do
  rake 'weekly_newsletter_email'
end

Cron Job Basic Syntax

Cron Jobs with Whenever

Now to test the Cron Job was succesfully created we can use the next command to read since terminal, our scheduled job in CRON SYNTAX:

your_project your_mac_user$ whenever

30 4 * * * /bin/bash -l -c 'cd /Users/your_mac_user/Desktop/your_project && RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rake weekly_newsletter_email --silent'

Now, to run the test in Development Environment, is wise to set the next line on the application.rb principal file to let the application knows where are the models it will use.

  subl your_project/config/application.rb

  config.action_mailer.default_url_options = { :host => "https://localhost:3000/" }

Now to let Capistrano V3 save the new Cron Job inside the server and the trigger which will fired up the execution of this task, we have to add the next requirement:

  subl your_project/Capfile

  require 'whenever/capistrano'

And insert into the deploy file the identifier which CRON JOB will use about the environment and the name of the application.

subl your_project/config/deploy.rb

set :whenever_identifier, ->{ "#{fetch(:application)}_#{fetch(:rails_env)}" }

And ready, after save changes on each file, run the capistrano deploy command:

  cap production deploy

And now your JOB was created and calendarize to run the Mailer Method which is what i want and in the range of time we set on this files.

ActionMailer Interceptor

Action Mailer provides hooks into the interceptor methods. These allow you to register classes that are called during the mail delivery life cycle.

An interceptor class must implement the :delivering_email(message) method which will be called before the email is sent, allowing you to make modifications to the email before it hits the delivery agents. Your class should make any needed modifications directly to the passed in Mail::Message instance.

It can be useful for developers to send email to themselves not real users.

Example of registering an actionmailer interceptor:

# config/initializers/override_mail_recipient.rb

if Rails.env.development? or Rails.env.test?
  class OverrideMailRecipient
    def self.delivering_email(mail)
      mail.subject = 'This is dummy subject'
      mail.bcc = 'test_bcc@noemail.com'
      mail.to = 'test@noemail.com'
    end
  end
  ActionMailer::Base.register_interceptor(OverrideMailRecipient)
end
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