Quickly Preview Mail With Laravel Mail Preview Package

Laravel Mail Preview is an amazing package that can display a small overlay whenever a mail is sent. The overlay contains a link to the mail that was just sent. This can be handy when testing out emails in a local environment.

Installation & Setup

You can install the package via composer:

composer require spatie/laravel-mail-preview

Configuring the mail transport

This package contains a mail transport called preview. We recommend only using this transport in non-production environments. To use the preview transport, change the mailers.smtp.transport to preview in your config/mail.php file:

// in config/mail.php

'mailers' => [
    'smtp' => [
        'transport' => 'preview',
        // ...
    ],
    // ...
],

Registering the Preview Middleware Route

The package can display a link to sent emails whenever they are sent. To use this feature, you must add the Spatie\MailPreview\Http\Middleware\AddMailPreviewOverlayToResponse middleware to the web middleware group in your kernel.

// in app/Http/Kernel.php

protected $middlewareGroups = [
    'web' => [
        // other middleware
        
        \Spatie\MailPreview\Http\Middleware\AddMailPreviewOverlayToResponse::class,
    ],
    
    // ...
];

You must also add the mailPreview to your routes file. Typically, the routes file will be located at routes/web.php.

// in routes/web.php
Route::mailPreview();

This will register a route to display sent mails at /spatie-mail-preview. To customize the URL, pass the URL you want to the macro.

Route::mailPreview('custom-url-where-sent-mails-will-be-shown');

Publishing the config file

Optionally, you can publish the config file with:

php artisan vendor:publish --provider="Spatie\MailPreview\MailPreviewServiceProvider" --tag="mail-preview-config"

Publishing the views

Optionally, you can publish the views that render the preview overlay and the mail itself.

php artisan vendor:publish --provider="Spatie\MailPreview\MailPreviewServiceProvider" --tag="mail-preview-views"

Usage

Every time an email is sent, an .html and .eml file will be saved in the directory specified in the storage_path of the mail-preview config file. The name includes the first recipient and the subject:

1457904864_john_at_example_com_invoice_000234.html
1457904864_john_at_example_com_invoice_000234.eml

You can open the .html file in a web browser. The .eml file in your default email client to have a realistic look at the final output.

Preview in a web browser

When you open the .html file in a web browser you’ll be able to see how your email will look.

At the beginning of the generated file you’ll find an HTML comment with all the message info:

<!--
From:{"info@acme.com":"Acme HQ"},
to:{"jack@gmail.com":"Jack Black"},
reply-to:{"info@acme.com"},
cc:[{"finance@acme.com":"Acme Finance"}, {"management@acme.com":"Acme Management"}],
bcc:null,
subject:Invoice #000234
-->

This package has a lot of options and many more, If you want to learn more, you can visit its documentation at Github.