Mailclerk

Mailclerk helps anyone on your team design great emails, improve their performance, and free up developer time. Learn more

Requirements
Setup
API Key & URL
Usage
Testing
Varying API Keys
Gem Tests
Versioning
Code of Conduct
Contributions
License
History

Requirements

Ruby 2.4.0

Setup

To install, run:

gem install mailclerk

Add the following to your Gemfile:

gem "mailclerk"

API Key & URL

To set the Mailclerk API Key (begins with mc_), you can provide it as an environmental variable: MAILCLERK_API_KEY. Alternatively, you can set it directly on the Mailclerk module:

# config/initializers/mailclerk.rb
Mailclerk.api_key = "mc_live_yourprivatekey"

If you are using version control like git, we strongly recommend storing your production API keys in environmental variables.

The default API endpoint is https://api.mailclerk.app. To change this, you can provide a MAILCLERK_API_URL ENV variable or set Mailclerk.mailclerk_url.

Usage

You'll need an active account and at least one template (in the example welcome-email).

To send an email to "alice@example.com":

Mailclerk.deliver("welcome-email", "alice@example.com")
Mailclerk.deliver("welcome-email", "Alice Adams <alice@example.com>")
Mailclerk.deliver("welcome-email", { name: "Alice Adams", address: "<alice@example.com>" })

If the template has any dynamic data, you can include it in the third parameter as a hash:

Mailclerk.deliver("welcome-email", "alice@example.com", { name: "Alice" })

See Mailclerk documentation for more details.

Testing

Your Mailclerk environment has two API keys: a production key (beginning with mc_live) and a test key (beginning with mc_test). If you use the test key, emails will not be delivered, but will show up in the logs on your Mailclerk account and can be previewed there. This replaces tools like Letter Opener for previewing emails in development.

To avoid cluttering up your Mailclerk test logs with sends triggered by your automated test suite, call Mailclerk.outbox.enable in the file that configures your tests. For example, in Rspec with Rails, add:

# spec/rails_helper.rb
Mailclerk.outbox.enable

This will also enable utility methods which you can use to write tests that check emails are sent with the correct data:

# Number of emails "sent"
Mailclerk.outbox.length

# Returns all emails of matching a template or email recipient. See method
Mailclerk.outbox.filter(template: "welcome-email")
Mailclerk.outbox.filter(recipient_email: "felix@example.com")

# Returns the most recent email (instance of Mailclerk::TestEmail):
email = Mailclerk.outbox.last
email.template        # "welcome-email"
email.recipient_email # "felix@example.com"
email.subject         # "Welcome to Acme Felix"
email.html            # "<html><body>..."

In between test cases, you should clear the stored emails by calling Mailclerk.outbox.reset.

For example, in Rspec with Rails:

# spec/rails_helper.rb
RSpec.configure do |config|
  config.before(:each) do
    Mailclerk.outbox.reset
  end
end

Mailclerk::OutboxEmail has the following attributes:

Attribute	Description
`template`	Slug of the template sent (1st argument to `Mailclerk.deliver`)
`recipient`	Hash representing the send recipient (2nd argument to `Mailclerk.deliver`)
`recipient_email`	Email of the send recipient
`recipient_name`	Name of the send recipient (nil if not specified)
`data`	Dynamic data for the send (3rd argument to `Mailclerk.deliver`)
`options`	Options specified for the send (4th argument to `Mailclerk.deliver`)
`from`	From Mailclerk: Hash with `name` and `address` of the sender
`subject`	From Mailclerk: Text of the send's subject line
`preheader`	From Mailclerk: Text of the send's preheader
`html`	From Mailclerk: Rendered body HTML for the send
`text`	From Mailclerk: Rendered plaintext version of the send
`headers`	From Mailclerk: Extra email headers (e.g. `reply-to`)

See the Mailclerk testing documentation for more details.

Varying API Keys

If you need to use multiple API keys, you can also initialize Mailclerk::Client instances with different keys. This:

mc_client = Mailclerk.new("mc_live_yourprivatekey")
mc_client.deliver("welcome-email", "bob@example.com")

Is equivalent to this:

Mailclerk.api_key = "mc_live_yourprivatekey"
Mailclerk.deliver("welcome-email", "bob@example.com")

Gem Tests

bundle exec rspec

Requires values in .env file as well

Versioning

Read Semantic Versioning for details. Briefly, it means:

Major (X.y.z) - Incremented for any backwards incompatible public API changes.
Minor (x.Y.z) - Incremented for new, backwards compatible, public API enhancements/fixes.
Patch (x.y.Z) - Incremented for small, backwards compatible, bug fixes.

Code of Conduct

Please note that this project is released with a CODE OF CONDUCT. By participating in this project you agree to abide by its terms.

mailclerk

Development

Runtime