Testing Laravel email with MailCatcher

MailCatcher is a great Ruby gem that provides you with a simple SMTP server and web interface to preview the output of HTML emails sent. I've been using it recently for testing our Laravel mailers.

Install it in the usual way;

$ [sudo] gem install mailcatcher

Just a quick note for you Ubuntu users, you'll need to ensure you have the libsqlite3 headers installed;

$ [sudo] apt-get install libsqlite3-dev

Start it up;

$ mailcatcher
Starting MailCatcher
==> smtp://127.0.0.1:1025
==> http://127.0.0.1:1080
*** MailCatcher runs as a daemon by default. Go to the web interface to quit.

Then configure Laravel to use smtp for emails, I do this in app/config/local/mail.php;

<?php
return [
    'driver' => 'smtp',
    'host' => '127.0.0.1',
    'port' => 1025,
    'encryption' => ''
];

Note you should definitely do this in your local configuration as you need to disable encryption for this to work as MailCatcher does not support TLS.