Last night I launched the registration site for Stats It, and Umbraco 5 add-on I’m working on and I wanted to get the site out quickly and well… cheaply so I decided that I’d just do a 1 page site in NodeJS.
For hosting I wanted to go with Heroku as I just love how simply I can get a site from my local machine to deployed with the platform and I also love how many add-ons there are available.
To send emails there’s a couple of choices, I decided to go with SendGrid for no reason other than they were the first that I saw :P.
So install SendGrid into your heroku app (I’m using the free version):
heroku addons:add sendgrid:starter
And now you need something to send emails from NodeJS, for this I’ve gone with node_mailer as it was the first in my search results and it’s got a dead simple API. What’s really cool about Heroku is that when you have add-ons such as SendGrid installed you get the config options injected, meaning sending an email is as simple as this:
var email = require('mailer');
email.send({
host: 'smtp.sendgrid.net',
port: '587',
authentication: 'plain',
username: process.env.SENDGRID_USERNAME,
password: process.env.SENDGRID_PASSWORD,
domain: 'heroku.com',
to: 'someone@somewhere.com',
from: 'someone@somewhere-else.com',
subject: 'You sent an email',
body: 'Hey look at that!'
}, function (err, result) {
//Do your error handling
});
You have to hard-code these settings:
host: 'smtp.sendgrid.net'port: '587'authentication: 'plain'
But Heroku will inject the username & password for you, both of which will be on the process.env object, like so:
process.env.SENDGRID_USERNAMEprocess.env.SENDGRID_PASSWORD
And there you have it, you’re not ready to send emails from NodeJS on Heroku.