Build An Uptime Monitor with Inertia

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33. Setting up email in Laravel

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01. Introduction

01. Introduction and demo

02. A fresh Inertia project

02. Sites

03. Site and dashboard setup

04. Building the site selector dropdown

05. Making use of API resources

06. Setting the default site

07. Setting up Vue modals

08. Creating a site

03. Endpoints

09. Setting up endpoints

10. Enum endpoint frequencies

11. Creating the endpoint form

12. Storing an endpoint

13. Validating and authorizing endpoint stores

14. Normalizing the endpoint location

15. Displaying endpoints

16. Deleting endpoints

17. Toggling inline editing for endpoints

18. Applying a watcher to the endpoint form

19. Storing endpoint edits

04. Checking endpoints

20. Determining endpoints to check

21. Creating a job to perform a check

22. Making an HTTP request

23. Scheduling checks every second

24. Setting up the check relationship

25. Updating the job

26. Showing the last status

27. Expanded list of checks

28. The response body modal

29. Authorizing the endpoint details

30. Calculating uptime for endpoints

05. Queuing

31. Setting up queues

32. Queuing the endpoint check

06. Email notifications

33. Setting up email in Laravel

34. Site model email notification storage

35. Adding email addresses via the UI

36. Listing and deleting email addresses

07. Downtime notifications

37. Observing when to notify

38. Creating an endpoint down notification

39. Creating an endpoint recovery notification

40. Making the emails a bit friendlier

08. Extras

41. Deleting sites

42. Eager loading

43. Recovery notification bug

44. No sites fix and placeholder

Transcript

00:00

We're now on to email notifications and there are loads of different ways that we can send email in Laravel,

00:05

all of which is on the documentation. It really depends on what service you want to end up using. However, in this video, we're just going to cover setting up sending emails on a local development and I'm going to show you a couple of solutions.

00:18

The first one is going to be the one that we're going to be using and that is just using a piece of software like Hello, which is just a local app that allows you to send all your emails to into a nice inbox that looks like this.

00:30

So we don't have any in there at the moment, but we'll start to see them roll in. Now, this is my preferred solution, but at the end of the video, I'm going to show you how to do this and log this to your log files just so you can see that the emails are actually being sent

00:44

and then of course you can set this up when you're in production to send to real email addresses. Okay, so we're going to use Hello here just to configure this and the first thing that we're going to do is come over to set up our mail stuff within our EMV file. So let's just go over to our EMV file here

01:02

and let's come down to the mail section. By default, this is set up to mail hog, which is another way that you can send emails locally. This is actually free as well. So you might want to go ahead and look into the installation steps to do that as well.

01:15

So since we're using Hello here, we're going to go ahead and set the mail host to 127.0.0.1. We're going to change the port to 2525. The username here, we're just going to call general. This just puts it into a specific inbox within Hello

01:31

and the password is going to be null, encryption is going to be null and we want to go ahead and choose a from address here, which doesn't really matter. We're just going to leave that hello at example.com. So if you are using Hello, that is how we're going to set this up.

01:44

Otherwise, you want to change your mail mailer to log. We'll take a look at how that works in a bit. Okay, so how do we send an email or create an email within Laravel? Well, we can use the make mail command.

01:55

So let's just create an example email that we're going to go ahead and send. Throughout the course, we're going to go ahead and use the markdown option here to generate out a nice email layout. But for now, let's just go ahead and create one out as it is.

02:10

Okay, so we're going to go ahead and open this example mail up, which now lives in app and mail and we're going to go down and take a look at what we have here. So let's go down.

02:18

We have a constructor so we can pass stuff into here, which is going to be really handy. If an endpoint goes down, of course, we're going to want to send the endpoint through to this

02:26

and we have this envelope method here, which allows us to create a subject and any other information out. Let's just leave that as example now, just so we can see that. And if we go down here, we have a content method,

02:37

which returns this new content object and we have a view that we can potentially use here. So this is the standard way that we would do this. So for example, if you did want to use just a standard view,

02:49

let's go over to our resources section and under our views, let's create an emails or an email folder out and just say example.blade.php. So I'm just going to write this is an example email

03:04

and we're going to go ahead and reference that over here. So that's going to be email example and let's just spell that correctly. There we go.

03:12

Okay, so we can attach things, but we don't need to do that in this case. This email is now good to send. So we're going to keep an eye on our hello inbox just here

03:21

or whatever solution that you're using and let's go over and send this email. So to do this within the terminal, we're just going to run phpr and tinker so we can send this off.

03:31

We're going to go ahead and say mail to and then we're going to choose a user or an email address. So I'm going to go ahead and say user find one. Of course, we're actually going to be sending that to the user within the app,

03:44

but let's go ahead and find that manually for now and we're going to go ahead and say send or more appropriately in our case since we have queue set up. We're actually going to end up using queue.

03:55

Let's go ahead and say send and we're going to new up that example email. So app mail and example and that should be pretty much all we need to send out an email

04:06

and you can see that over in the hello app. We've actually received a new email in here with the body that we just defined in that blade template. Okay, so let's just finally look at what is going to happen

04:17

if we wanted to set this to log. So I'm going to go ahead and open up the Laravel log file, which has a few errors in there. So we're going to get rid of that

04:25

and we're going to go ahead and send that email out again. So let's go over to our terminal. I'm going to exit off of this just to refresh everything and we're going to go back into tinker.

04:34

We're going to resend that email and what we should see is this pulled in. There is and you can see here. We've got all of the information who it's to

04:43

so that's that user that I picked out the subject here and the body. So if you don't have anything that you want to use for local development or you're still deciding feel free

04:52

to just set that to log and at least you will see the emails in your Laravel log file within this location. Okay, I'm going to get rid of that

05:00

and I'm going to switch this back to SMTP so we can send this through hello and we're now pretty much set up very easily to start sending emails.

Episode summary

In this episode, we're diving into how to set up sending emails locally in Laravel, which is super useful during development. First, we talk about the various options Laravel gives us for email sending—there are quite a few—but for now, we focus on local development solutions.

We'll use a tool called HeLo (or something similar, like Mailhog) that catches outgoing emails and gives you an inbox right on your machine, so you don't accidentally send anything to real users while testing. You'll see how to configure your .env file to use HeLo with the right SMTP host, port, and a test email address. We also mention Mailhog as a free alternative—so feel free to use whichever one suits you.

Afterwards, you'll see how to generate a basic example email in Laravel with the artisan make:mail command, set up a corresponding view (Blade file), and get it wired up.

We'll try sending our test email using Tinker in the terminal, and you'll be able to watch it come through in HeLo. Want to double check emails without a GUI inbox? We also show you how to log outgoing emails to the Laravel log file instead—just switch the mail driver and inspect the logs!

So by the end of this episode, you’ll have Laravel configured to send emails locally, either to a neat inbox or to your log files, and you’ll be ready to implement real email sending for production later. Perfect for painless email testing as you develop your app!

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