django-dbes (Django Database Email Storage)
A django package to speed-up your HTML email development workflow in django.
Warning: this package is intended for development only.
Use case
Working on email templates/styling in django can be really painful and slow:
- Dumping the email content to console via django's ConsoleBackend is just not enough when you work with HTML emails
- Sending the emails to a real adress is slow, requires a working SMTP server, and may be dangerous. It will also quickly spam your inbox.
A possible answer
What if we could display sent emails directly in browser during development ? It's actually quite simple, and it's exactly
what django-dbes does:
- Instead of sending mails or logging them to console, they're stored as model instances in the database
- The email URL is logged on the console so it can be accessed it in a web browser
- The view behind this URL retrieves the model instance and renders its content in a template
The project is also bundled with an admin module so you can quickly see what the last sent emails were and display them.
Quickstart
Install django-dbes:
pip install django-dbes
Then add the app to your settings.py:
INSTALLED_APPS = [
# other apps
'dbes',
]
EMAIL_BACKEND = 'dbes.backends.EmailBackend'
Add this to your URLs conf:
urlpatterns = [
# your urls
url(r'^emails/', include('dbes.urls', namespace='dbes')),
]
Run the migrations:
python manage.py migrate dbes
From now on, each time you send an email, it will be saved as a model instead of being sent. You'll also see a log output in your console, such as:
Sending email to contact@test.com with subject "Test". You can access this email at URL http://127.0.0.1:8000/emails/8b2b0bf2-bfb3-4771-a14c-f6d4dc9a635b
Just click the email link to display it.
Running Tests
Does the code actually work?
source <YOURVIRTUALENV>/bin/activate (myenv) $ pip install -r requirements-test.txt (myenv) $ python runtests.py
Credits
Tools used in rendering this package:
