Easy Email with SendGrid

In order to get up and running with email quickly and painlessly, I have been using the Heroku SendGrid plugin. Heroku creates some environment variables for use with your mail-library of choice when you install sendgrid:free. The problem with this is that you can't use these locally without setting them in your environment explicitly. Luckily you can work around this by referencing a file not in version control containing your sendgrid username and password, etc. Like so:

# Load private passwords for local development

# This file is not checked into version control and is used to store account information for development

if File.exist?("private_env.yaml")

YAML.load_file("private_env.yaml").each do |key,val|

ENV[key] = val

end

end

Then create the yaml file referenced:

---

SENDGRID_DOMAIN:   localhost.localdomain # sordina.net

SENDGRID_PASSWORD: XXXXXX

SENDGRID_USERNAME: XXXXXX@heroku.com

 

In order to determine these variables, just use the following command in your application:

heroku config -long

Now you are able to use the environment variables to send email with (in this example) Pony:

post '/contact' do

Pony.mail(

:to          => 'maydwell+sordina@gmail.com',

:from        => params[:email],

:subject     => "sordina.net feedback from [#{params[:name]}].",

:body        => params[:comment],

:via         => :smtp,

:via_options => {

:address        => 'smtp.sendgrid.net',

:port           => '25',

:authentication => :plain,

:user_name      => ENV['SENDGRID_USERNAME'],

:password       => ENV['SENDGRID_PASSWORD'],

:domain         => ENV['SENDGRID_DOMAIN']

})

redirect '/thanks'

end

Done!