The one thing that I’ve been struggling with the most during my Ruby on Rails learning curve is how to create a simple email form for any web applications I may want to create. There was nothing to be found on Google so in my initial attempt I worked through the ActionMailer documentation on the RoR wiki website. I put it all together and, feeling really pleased with myself, clicked the send button. Nothing at all, just lists of errors, so I modified it and still more errors. After posting on Ruby Forum and with the help of a talented member I finally got it working.
This post is for all the people like me who don’t know what to do.
First of all, this tutorial assumes that you already have a basic RoR web application set up with a ‘Contact’ controller and a main view for the index in the controller.
Now the real work starts. Open up a terminal session (or SSH) and navigate to your rails application’s directory (for this tutorial the rail application will be ‘rails_app’).
localhost:~ User$ cd /rails_app
Then create the mailer, ‘Emailer’ is the name of the model that will be produced.
localhost:~ User$ ./script/generate mailer Emailer
Now, that’s all the terminal work done. Lets start the setup.
In your chosen editor open the file ‘/rails_app/config/environment.rb’ and place the following inside the ‘Rails::Initializer’ block customizing all the necessaries to your SMTP server’s configuration.
config.action_mailer.delivery_method = :smtp
config.action_mailer.smtp_settings = {
:address => 'localhost',
:domain => 'website.co.uk',
:port => 25,
:authentication => :login,
:user_name => "smtp_username",
:password => "smtp_password"
}
config.action_mailer.perform_deliveries = true
config.action_mailer.raise_delivery_errors = false
config.action_mailer.default_charset = "utf-8"Now open the file ‘/rails_app/app/models/emailer.rb’ and make it look like the below, again customizing the necessaries (but do not touch the variables).
class Emailer < ActionMailer::Base
def contact_email(email_params)
# You only need to customize @recipients.
@recipients = "contact@website.co.uk"
@from = email_params[:name] + " <" + email_params[:address] + ">"
@subject = email_params[:subject]
@sent_on = Time.now
@body["email_body"] = email_params[:body]
@body["email_name"] = email_params[:name]
content_type "text/html"
end
endIn the controller for your contact page you will need to make the following changes, basically, adding a definition for ‘send_mail’.
def send_mail
Emailer::deliver_contact_email(params[:email])
endGo to the ‘/rails_app/views/emailer’ folder and create a file called ‘contact_email.html.erb’. In this file place the following code.
<p>Name:</p>
<p><%= @email_name %></p>
<p>Message:</p>
<p><%= @email_body %></p>
The final step is to create a form on the ‘Contact’ page that will allow the website to user to input and submit the email. An example for is illustrated below.
<% form_for :email, :url => { :controller => 'contact', :action => 'send_mail' } do |f| %>
<%= f.label :name %><br />
<%= f.text_field :name, :size => 60 %><br />
<%= f.label :address %><br />
<%= f.text_field :address, :size => 60 %><br />
<%= f.label :subject %><br />
<%= f.text_field :subject, :size => 60 %><br />
<%= f.label :body %><br />
<%= f.text_area :body, :rols => 10, :cols => 60 %><br />
<%= submit_tag "Send Email "%>
<% end %>That’s about it really, you may want to add your own error handling as this example only covers the basics. If you go to the contact page you can see a working example of the above tutorial in action. There are probably easier ways of doing this than the method I have described, but I like my method and hopefully it will work for you.
Update: The code in this post was updated for Rails 2.0.x on 17th March 2008.
Update: Modified the settings code to be ‘smtp_settings’ rather than ‘server_settings’, thanks goes to Lyle for discovering the problem (below).
Update: Modified the code to work for Rails 2.3.x onwards (but not Rails 3).
