Laravel 5.5 Send Email Example

In this article we will cover an example code of how to send emails in Laravel.

Setting up the Mail Driver

Laravel provides a API with driver support for SMTP, Mailgun, SpartPost etc. For testing in your development environment. I will suggest you to use SMTP fake mail service mailtrap.io . Mailtrap provides you with the online SMTP mailboxes that you can use to test your email service in development environment.

Go to this link setup a account. https://mailtrap.io/register/signup

Then go to Dashboard and create a Inbox with with your desired name.

Mailtrap create new inbox - Laravel Send Email — Mailtrap create new inbox – Laravel Send Email

Once your inbox is created you should be able to access its properties (username, password etc.)

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Open .env which is located in your project root and set the following properties in that file.

MAIL_DRIVER=smtp
MAIL_HOST=smtp.mailtrap.io
MAIL_PORT=2525
MAIL_USERNAME=efaea9a7b1713f
MAIL_PASSWORD=a5a09892d32fe5
MAIL_ENCRYPTION=null

Generating Mailables

In Laravel all the emails sent by your application must be defined by a Mailable class. To generate one such class for our demo email. Let’s generate a class with artisan command. Run the given below command in your project root

php artisan make:mail DemoMail

As this command is executed, A new Class named DemoMail.php will be generated under App/Mail. This class will have a build method which defines which view file to send as email.

<?php

namespace App\Mail;

use Illuminate\Bus\Queueable;
use Illuminate\Mail\Mailable;
use Illuminate\Queue\SerializesModels;
use Illuminate\Contracts\Queue\ShouldQueue;

class DemoMail extends Mailable
{
    use Queueable, SerializesModels;


    public function __construct()
    {
        //
    }


    public function build()
    {
        return $this->view('emails.demo');
    }
}

We have modified the name of view files as emails.demo. We will create a emails folder under resources/views in which we will keep our email views.

Email View File

Create a new file demo.blade.php under resources > views > emails and put following contents into it.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
    <title>Welcome Email</title>
</head>

<body>
<h2>Welcome to the site</h2>
<br/>
This is a email demo from 5balloons.info
</body>

</html>

Sending Email

These are all things we needed to setup our email. Now we can move on to the code that actually sends an email. We will modify the index method of our HomeController.php. Since I have authentication in my application, I am using Auth Facade to send email to logged in user. You can test this with any email.

    public function index()
    {
        $email = Auth::user()->email;
        Mail::to($email)->send(new DemoMail());
        return view('home');
    }

We are using Laravel’s Mail facade to send email and in the send method, we pass the name of the Mailable class that needs to be used for sending email.

That’s all is required to send mails.

Once you have learned how to configure Laravel Application to send emails. You might find these tutorials interesting.