email-templates
Advanced tools
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.
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 v6.4.0+); see breaking changes below. 2.x branch docs available if necessary.
UPDATE: v3.3+ uses the Bluebird library for promises since it is noticably faster than Native promises
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
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.
UPGRADING? If you are upgrading from v2 to v3, see v3 Breaking Changes below. You'll need Node v6.4.0+ now.
If you run into any issues with configuration, files, templates, locals, etc, then you can use the DEBUG environment flag:
DEBUG=email-templates node app.js
This will output to the console all debug statements in our codebase for this package.
You can swap the
transportoption 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
developmentortestenvironments, setoptions.sendtotrue.
const Email = require('email-templates');
const email = new Email({
message: {
from: 'niftylettuce@gmail.com'
},
// uncomment below to send emails in development/test env:
// send: true
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`
Please reference Nodemailer's attachment documentation for further reference.
If you want to set default attachments sent with every email:
const Email = require('email-templates');
const email = new Email({
message: {
from: 'niftylettuce@gmail.com',
attachments: [
{
filename: 'text1.txt',
content: 'hello world!'
}
]
}
});
email
.send({
template: 'mars',
message: {
to: 'elon@spacex.com'
},
locals: {
name: 'Elon'
}
})
.then(console.log)
.catch(console.error);
If you want to set attachments sent individually:
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',
attachments: [
{
filename: 'text1.txt',
content: 'hello world!'
}
]
},
locals: {
name: 'Elon'
}
})
.then(console.log)
.catch(console.error);
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({
// <https://github.com/Automattic/juice>
juice: true,
juiceResources: {
preserveImportant: true,
webResources: {
//
// this is the relative directory to your CSS/image assets
// and its default path is `build/`:
//
// e.g. if you have the following in the `<head`> of your template:
// `<link rel="stylesheet" href="style.css" data-inline="data-inline">`
// then this assumes that the file `build/style.css` exists
//
relativeTo: path.resolve('build')
//
// but you might want to change it to something like:
// relativeTo: path.join(__dirname, '..', 'assets')
// (so that you can re-use CSS/images that are used in your web-app)
//
}
}
});
If you don't need this module to send your email, you can still use it to render HTML and/or text templates.
Simply use the email.render(view, locals) method we expose (it's the same method that email.send uses internally).
If you need to render a specific email template file (e.g. the HTML version):
const Email = require('email-templates');
const email = new Email();
email
.render('mars/html', {
name: 'Elon'
})
.then(console.log)
.catch(console.error);
The example above assumes you have the following directory structure (note that this example would only render the html.pug file):
.
├── app.js
└── emails
└── mars
├── html.pug
├── text.pug
└── subject.pug
The Promise for email.render resolves with a String (the HTML or text rendered).
If you need to render all available template files for a given email template (e.g.
html.pug,text.pug, andsubject.pug– you can useemail.renderAll(this is the method thatemail.senduses).
const Email = require('email-templates');
const email = new Email();
email
.renderAll('mars', {
name: 'Elon'
})
.then(console.log)
.catch(console.error);
If you need to render multiple, specific templates at once (but not all email templates available), then you can use
Promise.allin combination withemail.render:
const Email = require('email-templates');
const email = new Email();
const locals = { name: 'Elon' };
Promise
.all([
email.render('mars/html', locals),
email.render('mars/text', locals)
])
.then(([ html, text ]) => {
console.log('html', html);
console.log('text', text);
})
.catch(console.error);
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:
Mac: brew install redis && brew services start redis
Ubuntu:
sudo add-apt-repository -y ppa:chris-lea/redis-server
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get -y install redis-server
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.
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: {} // <------ HERE
});
email
.send({
template: 'mars',
message: {
to: 'elon@spacex.com'
},
locals: {
locale: 'en', // <------ CUSTOMIZE LOCALE HERE (defaults to `i18n.defaultLocale` - `en`)
// is your user french?
// locale: 'fr',
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 ${name}, welcome to Mars`)
Note that if you use Lad, you have a built-in filter called translate:
p: :translate(locale) Hi #{name}
p: :translate(locale) Welcome to Mars, the red planet.
If you wish to have only a text-based version of your email you can simply pass the option textOnly: true.
Regardless if you use the htmlToText option or not (see next example), it will still render only a text-based version.
const Email = require('email-templates');
const email = new Email({
message: {
from: 'niftylettuce@gmail.com'
},
transport: {
jsonTransport: true
},
textOnly: true // <----- HERE
});
email
.send({
template: 'mars',
message: {
to: 'elon@spacex.com'
},
locals: {
name: 'Elon'
}
})
.then(console.log)
.catch(console.error);
You can pass an option to prefix subject lines with a string, which is super useful for deciphering development / staging / production environment emails.
For example, you could make it so on non-production environments the email is prefixed with a [DEVELOPMENT] Some Subject Line Here.
You could do this manually by passing a message.subject property, however if you are storing your subject lines in templates (e.g. subject.ejs or subject.pug) then it's not as easy.
Simply use the subjectPrefix option and set it to whatever you wish (note you will need to append a trailing space if you wish to have a space after the prefix; see example below):
const Email = require('email-templates');
const env = process.env.NODE_ENV || 'development';
const email = new Email({
message: {
from: 'niftylettuce@gmail.com'
},
transport: {
jsonTransport: true
},
subjectPrefix: env === 'production' ? false : `[${env.toUpperCase()}] `; // <--- HERE
});
By default we use
html-to-textto generate a plaintext version and attach it asmessage.text.
If you'd like to customize the text body, you can pass message.text or create a text template file just like you normally would for html and subject.
You may also set config.htmlToText: false to force the usage of the text template file.
const Email = require('email-templates');
const email = new Email({
message: {
from: 'niftylettuce@gmail.com'
},
transport: {
jsonTransport: true
},
htmlToText: false // <----- HERE
});
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.
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' // <---- HERE
}
}
});
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
}
});
You can pass a custom config.render function which accepts two arguments view and locals and must return a Promise.
Note that if you specify a custom config.render, you should have it use email.juiceResources before returning the final HTML. The example below shows how to do this.
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) => {
// this example assumes that `template` returned
// is an ejs-based template string
db.templates.findOne({ view }, (err, template) => {
if (err) return reject(err);
if (!template) return reject(new Error('Template not found'));
let html = ejs.render(template, locals);
html = await email.juiceResources(html);
resolve(html);
});
});
}
});
For a list of all available options and defaults view the configuration object.
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:
If you are upgrading from v2 or prior to v3, please note that the following breaking API changes occurred:
You need to have Node v6.4.0+, 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).
new EmailTemplate(templateDir, options). Now you will need to pass simply one object with a configuration as an argument to the constructor.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.templateDir can be used as such:-const newsletter = new EmailTemplate(templateDir);
+const email = new Email({
+ views: { root: templateDir }
+});
juiceResources.webResources.relativeTo is accurate.Instead of calling newsletter.render(locals, callback) you now call email.render(template, locals). The return value of email.render when invoked is a Promise and does not accept a callback function.
NOTE:
email-templatesv3 now has anemail.sendmethod (see basic usage example) which usesnodemailer; you should now useemail.sendinstead ofemail.render!
-newsletter.render({}, (err, result) => {
- if (err) return console.error(err);
- console.log(result);
-});
+email.render(template, {}).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.
Instead of having to configure this for yourself, you could just use Lad instead.
| Name | Website |
|---|---|
| Nick Baugh | http://niftylettuce.com |
FAQs
Create, preview (browser/iOS Simulator), and send custom email templates for Node.js. Made for Forward Email and Lad.
The npm package email-templates receives a total of 44,908 weekly downloads. As such, email-templates popularity was classified as popular.
We found that email-templates demonstrated a healthy version release cadence and project activity because the last version was released less than a year ago. It has 2 open source maintainers collaborating on the project.
Did you know?
Socket for GitHub automatically highlights issues in each pull request and monitors the health of all your open source dependencies. Discover the contents of your packages and block harmful activity before you install or update your dependencies.
Security News
GitHub removed 27 malicious pull requests attempting to inject harmful code across multiple open source repositories, in another round of low-effort attacks.
Security News
RubyGems.org has added a new "maintainer" role that allows for publishing new versions of gems. This new permission type is aimed at improving security for gem owners and the service overall.
Security News
Node.js will be enforcing stricter semver-major PR policies a month before major releases to enhance stability and ensure reliable release candidates.