ActionMailer::Markdown

A different take on using ActionMailer, Markdown and I18n.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'actionmailer-markdown'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install actionmailer-markdown

Imagine that you have a mail named UserMailer#welcome. Instead of manually defining your subjects like the following, you can create the subject by defining the user_mailer.welcome.subject translation.

# app/mailers/user_mailer.rb
class UserMailer < ApplicationMailer
  def welcome(email)
    mail to: email, subject: 'Welcome to Myapp'
  end
end

# config/locales/en.yml
en:
  user_mailer:
    welcome:
      subject: Welcome to my app

Since I really like defining everything I can in I18n files, I always extend this behavior to the message's body, through the user_mailer.welcome.body translation.

# config/locales/en.yml
en:
  user_mailer:
    welcome:
      subject: Welcome to my app
      body: |
        This is an e-mail body.

        --
        Myapp team

Did you notice that |? That allows YAML strings to be multiline. And on your e-mail class you can do something like this:

# app/mailers/user_mailer.rb
class UserMailer < ApplicationMailer
  def welcome(email)
    mail to: email, body: I18n.t('user_mailer.welcome.body')
  end
end

And if you want to render HTML and text-plain from this string, you may have to do something like this (Markdown class not shown).

# app/mailers/user_mailer.rb
class UserMailer < ApplicationMailer
  def welcome(email)
    message = I18n.t('user_mailer.welcome.body')

    mail to: email do |format|
      format.text { render plain: message }
      format.html { render html: Markdown.html(message).html_safe }
    end
  end
end

This idea is really nice, but you have too much things to deal with. Not anymore!

With ActionMailer::Markdown you can just define your mailer action like this:

# app/mailers/user_mailer.rb
class UserMailer < ApplicationMailer
  def welcome(email)
    mail to: email
  end
end

That's right! This gem automatically uses user_mailer.welcome.{subject,body} from your translation files. And the best part: it evens supports Markdown.

You're likely to pass in variables to your messages. To do this, just define instance variables. Imagine you want to parse the user's name on your subject and message. Let's suppose you have your translation file defined like this:

en:
  user_mailer:
    welcome:
      subject: "Welcome to Myapp, %{name}"
      body: |
        Hello, %{name}. And welcome to Myapp.

This is what your mailer will look like:

class UserMailer < ApplicationMailer
  def welcome(user)
    @name = user.name
    mail to: user.email
  end
end

Same thing for URLs:

class UserMailer < ApplicationMailer
  def activation_email(user)
    @name = user.name
    @activation_url = account_activation_url(user.uuid)
    mail to: user.email
  end
end

And your e-mail body can be something like this:

en:
  user_mailer:
    activation_email:
      subject: Activate your account
      body: |
        Hello, %{name}!

        You have to [activate your account](%{activation_url}).

        Thanks,

        --
        Myapp team

You may be wondering what happens with the mail's text part. Don't worry! ActionMailer::Markdown will take care of that. That message will be rendered as:

Hello, John!

You have to activate your account[1].

Thanks,
--
Myapp team

[1]: http://example.com/activate/4d4b4396-dc26-47c4-b433-2cd9a1b45ce1

Lists and other elements are also exported to a more friendly text version.

PROTIP: Use i18n-dot_lookup if you want to access properties from an object, like %{user.name}

redcarpet is the default Markdown parser. You may want to specify different options or even switch out to a different Markdown library. All you have to do is defining a processor that responds to .call. Let's say you want to use kramdown as your Markdown engine.

ActionMailer::Markdown.processor = -> text { Kramdown::Document.new(text).to_html }

You can use templates if you want. Just don't define the .body part of your translation. Also, if you pass a block to the mail() method, it will skip this functionally completely.

If you want to use Markdown files instead of I18n translations, this gem is not for you. Consider using maildown or markerb.

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake test to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/fnando/actionmailer-markdown. This project is intended to be a safe, welcoming space for collaboration, and contributors are expected to adhere to the Contributor Covenant code of conduct.

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.