This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Christy Jacob
Intro
#30DaysOfAppwrite is a month long event focused at giving developers a walkthrough of all of Appwrite's features, starting from the basics to more advanced features like Cloud Functions! Alongside we will also be building a fully featured Medium Clone to demonstrate how these
concepts can be applied when building a real world app. We also have some exciting prizes for developers who follow along with us!
Getting Started with SMTP
Welcome to Day 11 ?. SMTP stands for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. As with any other protocol, it defines some steps and guidelines that need to be adhered to, by all the computers on a network. SMTP is an application layer protocol in the TCP/IP stack and works closely with something called the Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) to send your communication to the right computer and email inbox.
In order to enable email functionality in Appwrite, you will need to setup a proper SMTP configuration. Because email deliverability can be both tricky and hard, it is often easier to delegate this responsibility to a 3rd-party SMTP provider like MailGun or SendGrid. These providers help you abstract the complexity of passing SPAM filters by doing a lot of the advanced configuration and validation for you.
Feel free to register with any provider of your choice and skip to the Configuration section, otherwise follow along to learn how to get the SMTP credentials from Sendgrid.
Setting up SendGrid
Create a SendGrid account here.
Verify ownership of a single email address to use as a sender. Instructions can be found here.
Setup a SMTP Relay under Email API -> Integration Guide and create an API Key.
Down below you should see all the credentials you need to setup SendGrid with Appwrite in the next step.
Configuration
Appwrite offers multiple environment variables to customize your server setup to your needs. In order to enable SMTP, you need to change the Appwrite container's environment variables. The following are important for us:
| Name | Description |
|---|---|
| _APP_SMTP_HOST | SMTP server host name address. Use an empty string to disable all mail sending from the server. The default value for this variable is an empty string |
| _APP_SMTP_PORT | SMTP server TCP port. Empty by default. |
| _APP_SMTP_SECURE | SMTP secure connection protocol. Empty by default, change to 'tls' if running on a secure connection. |
| _APP_SMTP_USERNAME | SMTP server user name. Empty by default. |
| _APP_SMTP_PASSWORD | SMTP server user password. Empty by default. |
To change these variables according to your needs, navigate to the appwrite directory where Appwrite was installed and edit the hidden .env file.
_APP_SMTP_HOST=smtp.sendgrid.net
_APP_SMTP_PORT=587
_APP_SMTP_SECURE=tls
_APP_SMTP_USERNAME=YOUR-SMTP-USERNAME
_APP_SMTP_PASSWORD=YOUR-SMTP-PASSWORD
After you finished updating you need to restart your Appwrite stack using the following command from your terminal:
docker-compose up -d --remove-orphans --build --force-recreate
That’s it!
Go to your Appwrite console, logout from your account and try to recover your password by navigating to Forgot password?. If you have followed along setting up the SMTP Server using SendGrid - this should also verify your integration.
If everything went well, you should receive an E-Mail with instructions to reset your password. Obviously this is not necessary and only a test to check if the SMTP server is working.
Tomorrow we will discuss how we can use our SMTP server to allow our users to verify their account with the associated email address.
Credits
We hope you liked this write up. You can follow #30DaysOfAppwrite on Social Media to keep up with all of our posts. The complete event timeline can be found here
Feel free to reach out to us on Discord if you would like to learn more about Appwrite, Aliens or Unicorns ?. Stay tuned for tomorrow's article! Until then ?
This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Christy Jacob
Christy Jacob | Sciencx (2021-05-11T14:53:01+00:00) #30DaysOfAppwrite : Getting Started with SMTP. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2021/05/11/30daysofappwrite-getting-started-with-smtp/
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