Capture Development Emails With Mailhog

My preferred way to capture and view emails being sent by a Rails app in development is to use MailHog. It runs a local SMTP server at port 1025 and a barebones email client at port 8025.

The mailhog utility can be installed with brew:

$ brew install mailhog

The development smtp settings are configured in config/environments/development.rb:

  config.action_mailer.delivery_method = :smtp
  config.action_mailer.smtp_settings = {
    address: 'localhost',
    port: 1025,
  }

Then start running mailhog with its default settings:

$ mailhog

All outgoing email from the development server will be captured and viewable in both html and text form at localhost:8025.