How to include an html email template in a node js application

Question

I have an html template that we use to send to new website registrations. It is a simple html file that I would like to load into a variable so that I can replace certain parts before sending out using nodemailer (eg [FIRST_NAME]). I am trying to avoid having to paste a large chunk of html into my exports function. Any ideas on how I could go about doing that?

For a clearer idea, what I need to know is how to actually do this:

var first_name = 'Bob';  
var html = loadfile('abc.html').replace('[FIRST_NAME]', first_name);

Answer 1

Here's an example of how to do it using ejs, but you can use any templating engine:

var nodemailer = require("nodemailer");
var ejs = require('ejs');

var transport = nodemailer.createTransport("SMTP", {
        service: <your mail service>,
        auth: {
            user: <user>,
            pass: <password>
        }
});

function sendMail(cb) {
    var user = {firstName : 'John', lastName: 'Doe'};

    var subject = ejs.render('Hello <%= firstName %>', user);
    var text = ejs.render('Hello, <%= firstName %> <%= lastName %>!', user);


    var options = {
        from: <from>,
        replyTo: <replyto>,
        to: <to>,
        subject: subject,
        text: text
    };

    transport.sendMail(options, cb);

}

To load the template file just us the fs module. Here's how to do it synchronously when the file is encoded in utf-8:

var fs = require('fs');

var template = fs.readFileSync('abc.html',{encoding:'utf-8'});