How to see e-mail views in browser using rails

Question

I am working on e-mails for my rails app. Right now the only way I know to view the e-mail is to send it to myself. How do I get "daily_summary.html.haml", which is in the "notifications" folder under the "views" folder, to render in the browser? I was thinking I should just add the route:

match 'notifications' => 'notifications/daily_summary'

But then I don't know how to handle the controller/action side of things.

Answer 1

Since Rails 4.1, e-mail preview is native. All you need to do is create a class in this directory:

test/mailers/previews/

The class must extend ActionMailer::Preview

class WeeklyReportPreview < ActionMailer::Preview
    def weekly_report
        WeeklyReport.weekly_report(User.first)
    end
end

Write methods that return Mail::Message objects. They are accessible in the development environment using this url:

http://localhost:3000/rails/mailers/[preview_class_name]/[method_name]

In my case:

http://localhost:3000/rails/mailers/weekly_report/weekly_report

More info can be found in the ActionMailer API documentation

Answer 2

There's a gem called Letter Opener that sounds like it'll do exactly what you're looking for. It previews email messages in the browser rather than sending them. I haven't used it myself. If it works I'd love to hear about it, though!

https://github.com/ryanb/letter_opener

There's another one called Mail Viewer but it hasn't been actively developed in quite some time. Probably better to steer clear:

https://github.com/37signals/mail_view