Griddler is a Rails engine that provides an endpoint for services that convert incoming emails to HTTP POST requests. It parses these POSTs and hands off a built email object to a class implemented by you.
- SendGrid wrote a great tutorial on integrating Griddler with your application.
- We have our own blog post on the subject over at Giant Robots.
-
Add
griddler
and an adapter gem to your application's Gemfile and runbundle install
. -
A route is needed for the endpoint which receives
POST
messages. To add the route, inconfig/routes.rb
you may either use the provided routing methodmount_griddler
or set the route explicitly. Examples:# config/routes.rb # mount using default path: /email_processor mount_griddler # mount using a custom path mount_griddler('/email/incoming') # the DIY approach: post '/email_processor' => 'griddler/emails#create'
An initializer can be created to control some of the options in Griddler.
Defaults are shown below with sample overrides following. In
config/initializers/griddler.rb
:
Griddler.configure do |config|
config.processor_class = EmailProcessor # CommentViaEmail
config.processor_method = :process # :create_comment (A method on CommentViaEmail)
config.reply_delimiter = '-- REPLY ABOVE THIS LINE --'
config.email_service = :sendgrid # :cloudmailin, :postmark, :mandrill, :mailgun
end
Option | Meaning |
---|---|
processor_class |
The class Griddler will use to handle your incoming emails. |
processor_method |
The method Griddler will call on the processor class when handling your incoming emails. |
reply_delimiter |
The string searched for that will split your body. |
email_service |
Tells Griddler which email service you are using. The supported email service options are :sendgrid (the default), :cloudmailin (expects multipart format), :postmark , :mandrill and :mailgun . You will also need to have an appropriate adapter gem included in your Gemfile. |
By default Griddler will look for a class named EmailProcessor
with a method
named process
, taking in one argument, a Griddler::Email
instance
representing the incoming email. For example, in ./lib/email_processor.rb
:
class EmailProcessor
def initialize(email)
@email = email
end
def process
# all of your application-specific code here - creating models,
# processing reports, etc
# here's an example of model creation
user = User.find_by_email(@email.from[:email])
user.posts.create!(
subject: @email.subject,
body: @email.body
)
end
end
Attribute | Description |
---|---|
#to |
An array of hashes containing recipient address information. See Email Addresses for more information. |
#from |
A hash containing the sender address information. |
#cc |
An array of hashes containing cc email address information. |
#subject |
The subject of the email message. |
#body |
The full contents of the email body unless there is a line in the email containing the string -- Reply ABOVE THIS LINE -- . In that case .body will contain everything before that line. |
#raw_text |
The raw text part of the body. |
#raw_html |
The raw html part of the body. |
#raw_body |
The raw body information provided by the email service. |
#attachments |
An array of File objects containing any attachments. |
#headers |
A hash of headers parsed by Mail::Header . |
#raw_headers |
The raw headers included in the message. |
Gridder::Email provides email addresses as hashes. Each hash will have the following information of each recipient:
Key | Value |
---|---|
:token |
All the text before the email's "@". We've found that this is the most often used portion of the email address and consider it to be the token we'll key off of for interaction with our application. |
:host |
All the text after the email's "@". This is important to filter the recipients sent to the application vs emails to other domains. More info below on the Upgrading to 0.5.0 section. |
:email |
The email address of the recipient. |
:full |
The whole recipient field (e.g., Some User <[email protected]> ). |
:name |
The name of the recipient (e.g., Some User ). |
You may want to create a factory for when testing the integration of Griddler into your application. If you're using factory_girl this can be accomplished with the following sample factory:
factory :email, class: OpenStruct do
# Assumes Griddler.configure.to is :hash (default)
to [{ full: '[email protected]', email: '[email protected]', token: 'to_user', host: 'email.com', name: nil }]
from({ token: 'from_user', host: 'email.com', email: '[email protected]', full: 'From User <[email protected]>', name: 'From User' })
subject 'email subject'
body 'Hello!'
attachments {[]}
trait :with_attachment do
attachments {[
ActionDispatch::Http::UploadedFile.new({
filename: 'img.png',
type: 'image/png',
tempfile: File.new("#{File.expand_path(File.dirname(__FILE__))}/fixtures/img.png")
})
]}
end
end
Bear in mind, if you plan on using the :with_attachment
trait, that this
example assumes your factories are in spec/factories.rb
and you have
an image file in spec/fixtures/
.
To use it in your tests, build with email = build(:email)
or email = build(:email, :with_attachment)
.
Depending on the service you want to use Griddler with, you'll need to add an
adapter gem in addition to griddler
.
Service | Adapter |
---|---|
sendgrid | griddler-sendgrid |
mandrill | griddler-mandrill |
mailgun | griddler-mailgun |
postmark | griddler-postmark |
Griddler can theoretically work with any email => POST service. In order to work correctly, adapters need to have their POST parameters restructured.
Griddler::Email
expects certain parameters to be in place for proper parsing
to occur. When writing an adapter, ensure that the normalized_params
method of
your adapter returns a hash with these keys:
Parameter | Contents |
---|---|
:to |
The recipient field |
:from |
The sender field |
:subject |
Email subject |
:text |
The text body of the email |
:html |
The html body of the email, or an empty string |
:attachments |
Array of attachments to the email. Can be an empty array. |
:headers |
The raw headers of the email. Optional. |
:charsets |
A JSON string containing the character sets of the fields extracted from the message. Optional. |
All keys are required unless otherwise stated.
Adapters should be provided as gems. If you write an adapter, let us know and we will add it to this README. See griddler-sendgrid for an example implementation.
Griddler was written by Caleb Thompson and Joel Oliveira.
Thanks to our contributors!
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