SMTP mini dev server

This provides a very basic, non-secure SMTP server to use in development, test and staging environments.

Do not use this in production!

Persistance is ephemeral, in-memory only.

I find this to be a convenient replacement for tools like etherreal, mailcatcher and similar.

Features

• Simple, fast, lightweight.
• Convenient for e2e testing (Cypress, puppeteer, ...).
• Allows developers, testers, product managers to inspect sent emails, but guarantees no development/test/staging emails ever get sent to real recipients.
• Faster than using third-party services.

Installation

npm install --save-dev @danielres/smtp-mini-dev-server
or
yarn add -D @danielres/smtp-mini-dev-server

Usage

node_modules/.bin/smtp-dev
or
yarn smtp-dev
starts the SMTP server on port 2500 and the api server on port 2501.

Ports can be changed through environment variables:

Example:
DEV_SMTP_PORT=1234 DEV_SMTP_API_PORT=1235 yarn smtp-dev

Example usage with nodemailer (in non-production environments)

const config = {
  host: "localhost",
  port: 2500,
  secure: false,
  auth: {
    user: "username", // username and password don't matter, any are accepted
    pass: "password"
  }
};

const transport = nodemailer.createTransport(config);

const sendMessage = () => {
  const message = {
    from: "[email protected]",
    to: "...",
    subject: "...",
    text: "...",
    html: "<p>...</p>"
  };

  return new Promise((resolve, reject) => {
    transport.sendMail(message, (error, info, response) => {
      if (error) return reject(error);
      const url = `http://localhost:2501/${info.messageId}/html`;
      console.log({ url });
      resolve({ info, response, url });
    });
  });
};

sendMessage()

The url of the email message will appear in your terminal output (console.log({ url })).

You can now:

• visit http://localhost:2501 for a list of all received messages.
• visit http://localhost:2501/<MESSAGE_ID> for all data related to a paticular message.
• view only specific data for a message:
  • http://localhost:2501/<MESSAGE_ID>/html
  • http://localhost:2501/<MESSAGE_ID>/text
  • ...

Screenshots