Devise Mailer

Posted by Aniqa Elahi on May 20, 2018

Devise is a great gem and provides a lot of functionality. Today I will expalin how I made a very simple app that utilizes Devise and uses its Mailer to send emails upon signing up and authorizes an email. For setting up Devise follow the following link

Setting Up Devise

So far our app has functionality of sidn up/signing in/signing out etc but we dont recieve ny email upon a sign up. Lets do it less than 10 steps

Step 1

Inside models/user.rb add :confirmable

 class User < ApplicationRecord
   # Include default devise modules. Others available are:
   # :confirmable, :lockable, :timeoutable and :omniauthable
  
   devise :database_authenticatable, :registerable,
          :recoverable, :rememberable, :trackable,:confirmable, :validatable
 end

Step 2

Before proceeding further lets make sure we get all the messages by placing following two lines in our views/layouts/application.html.erb before yield

<p class="notice"><%= notice %></p>
      <p class="alert"><%= alert %></p>

Step 3

inside **app/mailers/application_mailer.rb **

add default from:’ something.com’ which will notify users of the website sending them email.

class ApplicationMailer < ActionMailer::Base
  default from: 'something.com'
  layout 'mailer'
end

Step 4

Inside config/environments/development.rb, config/environments/production.rb, config/environments/test.rb

add the following code

config.action_mailer.default_url_options =
  { :host => 'localhost3000' }
config.action_mailer.delivery_method = :smtp
config.action_mailer.smtp_settings = {
  address:              'smtp.gmail.com',
  port:                 587,
  domain:               'heroku.com',
  user_name:            ENV['GMAIL_USERID'],
  password:             ENV['GMAIL_PASSWORD'],
  authentication:       'login',
  enable_starttls_auto: true
}

I will explain in a while what ENV[‘GMAIL_USERID’], ENV[‘GMAIL_PASSWORD’] are shortly. For learning purposes you can add your gmail address and password in the above piece of code but make sure you dont commit it to github untill you have a look at Setting Up Environment Variable(step 7).

Step 5

Inside config/initializers/devise.rb modify true to false as follows config.reconfirmable = false

Step 6

Configure Your google Account as follows

1.Enable IMAP from your Gmail settings in Forwarding IMAP/POP tab

  1. Allow less secure apps: ON from here

Step 7

It is very important for an application to have valuable data like password and emails hidden from general user. In order to accomplish that we will save them in our environment variables in a .env file.

The ENV constant refers to a global hash for your entire computer environment. You can store any key-value pairs in this hash more over instead of setting this variable directly its better to use it using a gem called dotenv-rails .

  1. lets first add dotenv-rails to Gemfile as

  2. gem 'dotenv-rails' 

        and run bundle

  3. Create a .env file at the root of app in this case** Mailer**

  4. Add gmail address and password as follows

    GMAIL_USERNAME = “your gmail address” GMAIL_PASSWORD = “ your gmail password”

  5. Finally the most important step is to not forget to add .env file in .gitignore, which will actually hide all of our important info from general public.

Github Repo