Attempting to get Email to work in Laravel 5

Question

Well let me first start out by saying I'm pretty new to laravel 5. I've been searching forever on google trying to get just a simple email to send just by typing in the appropriate URL with no luck. Unfortunately, the documentation out there I have found wasn't that helpful, and just gives a broad look(I understand laravel 5 is new, but still frustrating haha). There is nothing fancy about what I'm trying to do, I just want to get that too work before I do anything else. I'm trying to get this to work with just using gmail as of right now, but once I get that down I will of course, try something like Mailgun. This is the code I have as of right now The first one is in mail.php:

return [

/*
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Mail Driver
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------
|
| Laravel supports both SMTP and PHP's "mail" function as drivers for the
| sending of e-mail. You may specify which one you're using throughout
| your application here. By default, Laravel is setup for SMTP mail.
|
| Supported: "smtp", "mail", "sendmail", "mailgun", "mandrill", "log"
|
*/

'driver' => env('smtp'),



/*
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------
| SMTP Host Address
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------
|
| Here you may provide the host address of the SMTP server used by your
| applications. A default option is provided that is compatible with
| the Mailgun mail service which will provide reliable deliveries.
|
*/

'host' => env('MAIL_HOST', 'smtp.gmail.com'),



/*
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------
| SMTP Host Port
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------
|
| This is the SMTP port used by your application to deliver e-mails to
| users of the application. Like the host we have set this value to
| stay compatible with the Mailgun e-mail application by default.
|
*/

'port' => env('MAIL_PORT', 587),

/*
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Global "From" Address
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------
|
| You may wish for all e-mails sent by your application to be sent from
| the same address. Here, you may specify a name and address that is
| used globally for all e-mails that are sent by your application.
|
*/

'from' => ['address' =>"[email protected]" , 'name' => "example_name"],

/*
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------
| E-Mail Encryption Protocol
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------
|
| Here you may specify the encryption protocol that should be used when
| the application send e-mail messages. A sensible default using the
| transport layer security protocol should provide great security.
|
*/

'encryption' => 'tls',


/*
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------
| SMTP Server Username
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------
|
| If your SMTP server requires a username for authentication, you should
| set it here. This will get used to authenticate with your server on
| connection. You may also set the "password" value below this one.
|
*/

'username' => env('[email protected]'),

/*
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------
| SMTP Server Password
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------
|
| Here you may set the password required by your SMTP server to send out
| messages from your application. This will be given to the server on
| connection so that the application will be able to send messages.
|
*/

'password' => env('example'),

/*
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Sendmail System Path
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------
|
| When using the "sendmail" driver to send e-mails, we will need to know
| the path to where Sendmail lives on this server. A default path has
| been provided here, which will work well on most of your systems.
|
*/

'sendmail' => '/usr/sbin/sendmail -bs',


/*
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Mail "Pretend"
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------
|
| When this option is enabled, e-mail will not actually be sent over the
| web and will instead be written to your application's logs files so
| you may inspect the message. This is great for local development.
|
*/

'pretend' => false,

];

This is in my routes:

Route::get('test', function()
{
Mail::send('Email.test', function ($message)
{
    $message->to('[email protected]', 'example_name')->subject('Welcome!');
});
});

I also tried the MailController@Sending_Email for the path as well. This is in my MailController:

class MailController extends Controller{
public function Sending_Email()
{
   $this->call('GET','Email.test');
    return View('Email.test');
}

}

and my view is this simple code:

<html>
<head>

</head>
<body>
    <h1>hey this is a test to see if my email system works</h1>
</body>
</html>

This is my error: Missing argument 1 for Illuminate\Support\Manager::createDriver(), called in /vagrant/leonis/vendor/laravel/framework/src/Illuminate/Support/Manager.php on line 89 and defined

Answer 1

You have a couple issues going on. First off:

'driver' => env('smtp'),

The env method looks to your .env file. My guess is you don't have a "smtp" entry in your .env file. I would simply change it to this:

'driver' => 'smtp',

That should take care of the createDriver() error.

If you still have issues with the driver, or later on have issues authenticating to your SMTP server, do a quick check of your config at runtime:

dd(Config::get("mail"));

Since you have env() checking for .env settings and then falling back to default values, it can be helpful to see what the generated config looks like.

Now you still have an issue with how you are calling Mail::send. This is your code:

Mail::send('Email.test', function ($message)

And this is from the Laravel documentation:

Mail::send('emails.welcome', ['key' => 'value'], function($message)

Notice that the second argument is an array. The callback function should be the third argument.

From the docs:

The second is the data to be passed to the view, often as an associative array where the data items are available to the view by $key.

So do something like this:

Mail::send('Email.test', [], function ($message) { 
    $message->to('[email protected]', 'example_name')->subject('Welcome!');
});

Answer 2

You may need to

php artisan config:clear

then

php artisan config:cache