An Email Form with Ruby on Rails

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 at the very end of the file customizing all the necessaries to your SMTP server’s configuration.

ActionMailer::Base.delivery_method = :smtp
ActionMailer::Base.server_settings = {
    :address        => 'smtp.website.co.uk',
    :port           => 25,
    :authentication => :login,    # Don't change this one.
    :user_name      => "smtp_username",
    :password       => "smtp_password"
}
ActionMailer::Base.perform_deliveries = true
ActionMailer::Base.raise_delivery_errors = true
ActionMailer::Base.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, sent_at = Time.now)
        # You only need to customize @recipients.
        @recipients = "contact@website.co.uk"
        @from = email_params[:name] + " <" + email_params[:address] + ">"
        @subject = email_params[:subject]
        @sent_on = sent_at
        @body["email_body"] = email_params[:body]
        @body["email_name"] = email_params[:name]
    end
end

In 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])
end

Go to the ‘/rails_app/views/emailer’ folder and create a file called ‘contact_email.rhtml’. In this file place the following code.

Name:

<%= @email_name %>

Message:

<%= @email_body %>

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.

<%= start_form_tag :action=> "send_mail" %>
<table>
    <tr>
        <td><label for="email_name">Name:</label></td>
        <td><%= text_field "email", "name", :size => 30 %></td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td><label for="email_address">Email Address:</label></td>
        <td><%= text_field "email", "address", :size => 30 %></td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td><label for="email_subject">Subject:</label></td>
        <td><%= text_field "email", "subject", :size => 30 %></td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td><label for="email_body">Body:</label></td>
        <td><%= text_area "email", "body", :rows => 8, :cols => 30 %></td>
    </tr>
</table>

<input type="submit" value="Send Email" class="primary" />
<%= end_form_tag %>

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.