Create, preview, and send custom email templates for Node.js. Highly configurable and supports automatic inline CSS, stylesheets, embedded images and fonts, and much more! Made for sending beautiful emails with Lad.
NEW: v3.x is released (you'll need Node v7.6.0+); see breaking changes below. 2.x branch docs available if necessary.
Table of Contents
Install
By default we recommend pug for your template engine, but you can use any template engine.
npm:
npm install email-templates pug
yarn:
yarn add email-templates pug
Preview
We've added preview-email by default to this package!
This means that (by default) in the development environment (e.g. NODE_ENV=development
) your emails will be rendered to the tmp directory for you and automatically opened in the browser.
View the demo
Usage
UPGRADING? If you are upgrading from v2 to v3, see v3 Breaking Changes below. You'll need Node v7.6.0+ now for Promises and async/await support.
Basic
You can swap the transport
option with a Nodemailer transport configuration object or transport instance. We highly recommend using Postmark for your transport (it's the default in Lad).
If you want to send emails in development
or test
environments, set options.send
to true
.
const Email = require('email-templates');
const email = new Email({
message: {
from: 'niftylettuce@gmail.com'
},
transport: {
jsonTransport: true
}
});
email.send({
template: 'mars',
message: {
to: 'elon@spacex.com'
},
locals: {
name: 'Elon'
}
}).then(console.log).catch(console.error);
The example above assumes you have the following directory structure:
.
├── app.js
└── emails
└── mars
├── html.pug
└── subject.pug
And the contents of the pug
files are:
html.pug
:
p Hi #{name},
p Welcome to Mars, the red planet.
subject.pug
:
= `Hi ${name}, welcome to Mars`
Automatic Inline CSS via Stylesheets
Simply include the path or URL to the stylesheet in your template's <head>
:
link(rel="stylesheet", href="/css/app.css", data-inline)
This will look for the file /css/app.css
in the build/
folder.
If this asset is in another folder, then you will need to modify the default options when creating an Email
instance:
const email = new Email({
juice: true,
juiceResources: {
preserveImportant: true,
webResources: {
relativeTo: path.resolve('build')
}
}
});
Cache Pug Templates
We strongly suggest to follow this example and pre-cache your templates with cache-pug-templates (if you're using the default Pug template engine).
If you do not do this, then your Pug templates will re-compile and re-cache every time you deploy new code and restart your app.
-
Ensure you have Redis (v4.x+) installed:
-
Install the packages:
npm:
npm install cache-pug-templates redis
yarn:
yarn add cache-pug-templates redis
-
Configure it to read and cache your entire email templates directory:
const path = require('path');
const cachePugTemplates = require('cache-pug-templates');
const redis = require('redis');
const Email = require('email-templates');
const redisClient = redis.createClient();
const email = new Email({
message: {
from: 'niftylettuce@gmail.com'
},
transport: {
jsonTransport: true
}
});
cachePugTemplates(redisClient, email.config.views.root);
-
For more configuration options see cache-pug-templates.
Localization
All you need to do is simply pass an i18n configuration object as config.i18n
(or an empty one as this example shows to use defaults).
const Email = require('email-templates');
const email = new Email({
message: {
from: 'niftylettuce@gmail.com'
},
transport: {
jsonTransport: true
},
i18n: {}
});
email.send({
template: 'mars',
message: {
to: 'elon@spacex.com'
},
locals: {
name: 'Elon'
}
}).then(console.log).catch(console.error);
Then slightly modify your templates to use localization functions.
html.pug
:
p= t(`Hi ${name},`)
p= t('Welcome to Mars, the red planet.')
subject.pug
:
= t(`Hi ${name}, welcome to Mars`)
Note that if you use Lad, you have a built-in filter called translate
:
p: :translate(locale) Hi #{name}
p: :translate(locale) Welcome to Mars, the red planet.
Custom Text Template
By default we use html-to-text
to generate a plaintext version and attach it as message.text
.
If you'd like to customize the text body, you can pass message.text
or set config.htmlToText: false
(doing so will automatically lookup a text
template file just like it normally would for html
and subject
).
const Email = require('email-templates');
const email = new Email({
message: {
from: 'niftylettuce@gmail.com'
},
transport: {
jsonTransport: true
},
htmlToText: false
});
email.send({
template: 'mars',
message: {
to: 'elon@spacex.com'
},
locals: {
name: 'Elon'
}
}).then(console.log).catch(console.error);
text.pug
:
| Hi #{name},
| Welcome to Mars, the red planet.
Custom Template Engine (e.g. EJS)
-
Install your desired template engine (e.g. EJS)
npm:
npm install ejs
yarn:
yarn add ejs
-
Set the extension in options and send an email
const Email = require('email-templates');
const email = new Email({
message: {
from: 'niftylettuce@gmail.com'
},
transport: {
jsonTransport: true
},
views: {
options: {
extension: 'ejs'
}
}
});
Custom Default Message Options
You can configure your Email instance to have default message options, such as a default "From", an unsubscribe header, etc.
For a list of all available message options and fields see the Nodemailer message reference.
Here's an example showing how to set a default custom header and a list unsubscribe header:
const Email = require('email-templates');
const email = new Email({
message: {
from: 'niftylettuce@gmail.com',
headers: {
'X-Some-Custom-Thing': 'Some-Value'
},
list: {
unsubscribe: 'https://niftylettuce.com/unsubscribe'
}
},
transport: {
jsonTransport: true
}
});
Custom Rendering (e.g. from a MongoDB database)
You can pass a custom config.render
function which accepts two arguments view
and locals
and must return a Promise
.
If you wanted to read a stored EJS template from MongoDB, you could do something like:
const ejs = require('ejs');
const email = new Email({
render: (view, locals) => {
return new Promise((resolve, reject) => {
db.templates.findOne({ view }, (err, template) => {
if (err) return reject(err);
if (!template) return reject(new Error('Template not found'));
resolve(ejs.render(template, locals));
});
});
}
});
Options
For a list of all available options and defaults view the configuration object.
Plugins
You can use any nodemailer plugin. Simply pass an existing transport instance as config.transport
.
You should add the nodemailer-base64-to-s3 plugin to convert base64 inline images to actual images stored on Amazon S3 and Cloudfront.
We also highly recommend to add to your default config.locals
the following:
V3 Breaking Changes
If you are upgrading from v2 or prior to v3, please note that the following breaking API changes occurred:
-
You need to have Node v7.6.0+ (since we use features like async/await and Promises). We recommend using nvm to manage your Node versions.
-
Instead of calling const newsletter = new EmailTemplate(...args)
, you now call const email = new Email(options)
.
- The arguments you pass to the constructor have changed as well.
- Previously you'd pass
new EmailTemplate(templateDir, options)
. Now you will need to pass simply one object with a configuration as an argument to the constructor. - If your
templateDir
path is path.resolve('emails')
(basically ./emails
folder) then you do not need to pass it at all since it is the default per the configuration object. - The previous value for
templateDir
can be used as such:
-const newsletter = new EmailTemplate(templateDir);
+const email = new Email({
+ views: { root: templateDir }
+});
-
Instead of calling newsletter.render(locals, callback)
you now call email.render(locals)
. The return value of email.render
when invoked is a Promise
and does not accept a callback function.
-newsletter.render({}, (err, result) => {
- if (err) return console.error(err);
- console.log(result);
-});
+email.render({}).then(console.log).catch(console.error);
-
Localized template directories are no longer supported. We now support i18n translations out of the box. See Localization for more info.
-
A new method email.send
has been added. This allows you to create a Nodemailer transport and send an email template all at once (it calls email.render
internally). See the Basic usage documentation above for an example.
-
There are new options options.send
and options.preview
. Both are Boolean values and configured automatically based off the environment. Take a look at the configuration object.
-
If you wish to send emails in development or test environment (disabled by default), set options.send
to true
.
Tip
Instead of having to configure this for yourself, you could just use Lad instead.
Contributors
License
MIT © Nick Baugh