BetterOpener
Preview mails and other notifications in your browser instead of actually sending them out. Inspired by and similar in terms of functionality to the LetterOpener and the MailView gem BetterOpener tries to be better by:
- providing support for outgoing notifications in general (email, sms so far)
- supporting pre- and on-demand rendering
- allowing remote access to notifications (helpful on staging servers and remote development machines)
- displaying desktop notifications (with the accompanying chrome plugin)
Setup
Add the gem to your development environment and run the bundle install
command to install it.
gem "better_opener", :group => :development
Then in Rails3 mount the bundled Sinatra app inline in your routes.rb
:
if Rails.env == "development"
mount BetterOpener::Server => "/notifications"
end
To prevent messages from actually being sent you need to set up email and/or sms interception.
Set the delivery method in config/environments/development.rb
config.action_mailer.delivery_method = :better_opener
The design of the email interface is taken from the mail_view plugin.
SMS
SMS message support is provided for the sms_gateway gem.
Edit your sms_gateway.yml
file:
development:
adapter: better_opener
from: your_app
SMS interface:
On-request Rendering
The messages that are being sent with one of the above delivery methods are
static (pre-rendered at time of delivery). To preview your changes without
going through all the steps to redeliver the message use the
add_delayed_notification
method like that:
class Emailer < ActionMailer::Base
# ....
def self.deliver_later(method, *params)
if Rails.env == "development"
BetterOpener.add_delayed_notification("email", Emailer, method, params)
else
Resque.enqueue(EmailJob, method, *params)
end
end
end
Chrome Plugin
To get actual desktop notifications, you will want to install the accompanying chrome-plugin. Point it to the (full) notification path that you mounted this gem on.