Sending mails using Sendgrid on Nodejs

The open-event webapp generator project needs to send an email to the user notifying him whenever generating the webapp is finished, containing the links to the preview and zip download.

For sending emails, the easiest service we found we could use was SendGrid  which provides upto 15000 free emails a month for students who have a Github Education Pack. (It anyway provides 10000 free emails to all users).

To use sendgrid, it’s best to use the sendgrid npm module that SendGrid officially builds. To get that installed just use the following command –

npm install --save sendgrid

Also, once you have made an account on Sendgrid, create an API key, and save it as an environment variable (so that your API key is not exposed in your code). For example in our project, we save it in the environment variable SENDGRID_API_KEY
To make it permanent you can add it to your ~/.profile file

export SEDGRID_API_KEY=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

The actual sending takes place in the mailer.js script in our project.

Basically we are using the mail helper class provided in the sendgrid module, and the bare minimum code required to send a mail is as follows

  var helper = require('sendgrid').mail
  from_email = new helper.Email('test@example.com')
  to_email = new helper.Email('test@example.com')
  subject = 'Hello World from the SendGrid Node.js Library!'
  content = new helper.Content('text/plain', 'Hello, Email!')
  mail = new helper.Mail(from_email, subject, to_email, content)
 
  var sg = require('sendgrid')(process.env.SENDGRID_API_KEY);
  var request = sg.emptyRequest({
    method: 'POST',
    path: '/v3/mail/send',
    body: mail.toJSON()
  });
 
  sg.API(request, function(error, response) {
    console.log(response.statusCode)
    console.log(response.body)
    console.log(response.headers)
  })

You need to replace the to and from emails to your requirements.

Also as you can see in our project’s code, if you want to send HTML formatted data, you can change the content type from text/plain to text/html and then add any html content (as a string) into the content.

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Using Heroku pipelines to set up a dev and master configuration

The open-event-webapp project, which is a generator for event websites, is hosted on heroku. While it was easy and smooth sailing to host it on heroku for a single branch setup, we moved to a 2-branch policy later on. We make all changes to the development branch, and every week once or twice, when the codebase is stable, we merge it to master branch.

So we had to create a setup where  –

master branch –> hosted on –> heroku master

development branch –> hosted on –> heroku dev

Fortunately, for such a setup, Heroku provides a functionality called pipelines and a well documented article on how to implement git-flow

 

First and foremost, we created two separate heroku apps, called opev-webgen and opev-webgen-dev

To break it down, let’s take a look at our configuration. First step is to set up separate apps in the travis deploy config, so that when development branch is build, it pushed to open-webgen-dev and when master is built, it pushes to opev-webgen app. The required lines as you can see are –

https://github.com/fossasia/open-event-webapp/blob/master/.travis.yml#L25

https://github.com/fossasia/open-event-webapp/blob/development/.travis.yml#L25

Now, we made a new pipeline on heroku dashboard, and set opev-webgen-dev and opev-webgen in the staging and production stages respectively.

Screenshot from 2016-07-31 04-33-30 Screenshot from 2016-07-31 04-34-41

Then, using the “Manage Github Connection” option, connect this app to your github repo.

Screenshot from 2016-07-31 04-36-17

Once you’ve done that, in the review stage of your heroku pipeline, you can see all the existing PRs of your repo. Now you can set up temporary test apps for each PR as well using the Create Review App option.

Screenshot from 2016-07-31 04-37-38

So now we can test each PR out on a separate heroku app, and then merge them. And we can always test the latest state of development and master branches.

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