marilena

Intro

Emails are hard to develop. There are some awesome library that makes the development more easy. But each library allow us to do a single thing without focus on a full development flow. This project wants to mix up MJML, a template engine for variables/logic and a web server, to create a basic an opinioned simple tool to generate email with a simple flow and command. Please Remember that market offers some cool services like Stripo, Mailchimp and others.

🚀 Usage

Install (require node >=16)

npm i marilena

How to use it

0 - setup your package.json:

"scripts": {
  "start": "marilena --server",
  "build": "marilena --build",
  "example": "marilena --create-example", // if you run this script, it generate a basic working example, and then you can run start
  ...other
},

1 - create a marilena.config.mjs file. Preferably under the root project:

import path from "path";
// you can leverage your IDE's intellisense with jsdoc type hints
/** @type {import('marilena').Config} */
export default {
  inputFolder: "./input",
  outputFolder: "./output",
  textVersion: (emailName, locale) => `${emailName}_text_version-${locale}.txt`,
  locales: ["it", "en"],
  templateOptions: {
    engine: "eta",
    prepareEngine: (eta) => {
      eta.configure({
        views: path.join(process.cwd(), "playground/input"),
      });
    },
  },
  mjmlParsingOptions: {
    keepComments: false,
  },
};

1A - if you put marilena.config.mjs in a different path folder you have to update scripts:

"scripts": {
  "start": "marilena --server --project myFolder/marilena.config.mjs",
  "build": "marilena --build --project myFolder/marilena.config.mjs",
},

2 - create a file structures based on your config. Please remember that each email template requires index.html as name, and variables are loaded only from variables.json or variables.yml.

project
| marilena.config.mjs
│ package.json
│ input
│ └──common-en.json // common json variables for all en emails
│ └──common-it.yaml // common yaml variables for all it emails
│ └──buy // email name
││││││└─── index.html
││││││└─── en
│││││││││││└── variables.json // json variables for en buy email
││││││└─── it
│││││││││││└── variables.yaml // yaml variables for it buy email

3 - fill your emails template with MJML syntax

<mjml>
  <mj-body>
    <mj-section>
      <mj-column>
        <!-- eta js example, read below about template engine -->
        <mj-text>hello <%= it.user %></mj-text>
      </mj-column>
    </mj-section>
  </mj-body>
</mjml>

4 - run one of these 2 commands

# open a server on http://localhost:8080
npm run start

# build all emails based on config (template engine, output folder, and locales)
npm run build

Configuration

Under the hood a default configuration will be loaded but a file marilena.config.mjs allow us to set:

name	required	description	default
inputFolder	X	folder where email are in the project. Path is relative to marilena.config.mjs	input
outputFolder	X	folder used for generated email (when run build command). Path is relative to marilena.config.mjs	output
locales	X	array of languages used. If you company has only spanish email use an array of single value	["en"]
templateOptions		if you chose to use one of supported engines, this part is mandatory to setup custom partial and other settings for the template engine selected. Read below for some use cases	empty
mjmlParsingOptions		options passed to mjml render. See: mjml options
textVersion		function of type (emailName: string, locale: string) => string. If set, this function allow to generate text version of email stripping all html. The function must return file name es: ${emailName}-${locale}-text-version.txt

About templateOptions

This project can producte output html from input template. But in a real word probably we store variables in some part and render some content multiple times (example a footer). In this case templateOptions can define:

• engine: eta or handlebars are supported. Apart eta, which is used also in the project library, all others requires dependency installed since marilena use lazy import for engines.
• prepareEngine: define a callback where we can setup our engine. Basically you can define all things before the render. For example:

	templateOptions: {
		engine:  "eta",
		prepareEngine: (eta) => {
            // eta is an istance of new Eta() so you need to set at least views options for templates/layout/partials
            eta.configure({
              views: path.join(process.cwd(), "input"),
            });
            // we can register partial like:
            eta.loadTemplate(...);
		},
	},

	templateOptions: {
		engine:  "handlebars",
		prepareEngine: (h) => {
            // we can register partial like:
            // handlebars is same of var h = require("handlebars");
            h.registerPartial("myPartial", "partial with {{ user }}");
		},
	},

---

Use css

If you want to add a css file import in mj-include tag. Path start from root directory of the project (like package json):

<mjml>
  <mj-body>
    <mj-include path="input/styles.css" type="css" css-inline="inline"/>
    <!-- other mjml nodes -->
  </mj-body>
</mjml>

🚀 features

• MJML support
• load variables with template engine
• eta.js, handlebars (need to install if you use one of these engines)
• ejs, nunjucks, mustache, dot, liquid
• fast-refresh on variables changes
• fast-refresh on template change
• fast-refresh on css change
• load varibles from yaml/json format
• load common variables
• pass option to MJML render
• config in typescript
• easy way to send a real email
• fast-refresh on config change