Tag: website-development

Intercepting mail with MailHog in Laravel Valet

I’m trying out using Laravel Valet to manage the development environments for both my WordPress and Laravel related work. (This is not the result of any dissatisfaction with VVV, which I’ve happily been using for the WP work, and Laravel Homestead, which I’ve happily been using for Laravel work, but comes as a necessity now that I am using a Mac with Apple’s M1 ARM chip, which doesn’t support Intel Vagrant virtual machines.)

The Valet installation and setup was easy and fast using their instructions, and I’ve been able to successfully move projects over to it without a lot of hassle. The one place where I was really bit was taking for granted how those previous virtual environments where handling the intercepting of email generated by my applications, so that they didn’t actually go out onto the Internet for actual delivery. I got used to spinning up environments with copies of production data and not worrying about real users getting email messages.

Well, you can guess what happened when I did that in Valet, which by default delivers email just like any other email generated from a process running on my Mac. Spinning up a WordPress dev site with a slightly outdated database dump and with functionality that is all about notifying users via email of things that are about to happen or have happened meant…lots of emails going out.

Ugh. Apologies, installing Stop Emails and other cleanup ensued.

Fortunately, the long term fix is pretty easy. Yes, there are various plugins one can install on individual WordPress sites to stop email from going out, or to change default SMTP behavior. But I didn’t want to have to worry about that each time I clone a site. So instead I changed the default SMTP behavior for the php-fpm processes that Valet runs to deliver all mail to MailHog.

First, I installed MailHog:

brew install mailhog
brew services start mailhog

Then, I added a smtp-mailhog.ini file in the PHP conf.d directory for my setup. In my case that was each version in /opt/homebrew/etc/php/X.X/conf.d. The contents of that file are:

; Use Mailhog for mail delivery
sendmail_path=mailhog sendmail

Then I ran valet restart and tested by triggering a password reset email from a WordPress site, and confirmed that it had been intercepted by visiting the MailHog interface at http://127.0.0.1:8025.

Of course this setup may not fit every use case, so adjust your config accordingly. (I submitted a PR to the Laravel docs with this info, but understandably it was probably too specific to my setup.) Even if you don’t change the PHP-level settings, with MailHog installed you could set up individual sites/applications to send to it as needed.

How I built and launched a SaaS app in one month

In June of this year, I had an idea for a software-as-a-service (Saas) application that I wanted to build and launch. On July 1st, I committed the first lines of code to a git repo for the app. After about 200 hours of development time, on August 10th I launched the first version of the application into the world, ready for users and subscribers.

The service is called WP Lookout and you can read more about the service itself and why I built it on wplookout.com. This post is about the process, tools and services I used to build and launch a SaaS application in what felt like a relatively short period of time.

Here’s the short list of resources I used along the way if you just want to explore them without further commentary:

  • Laravel for the application framework
  • Laravel Homestead for my local development environment
  • PhpStorm for software development
  • Laravel Spark for scaffolding the SaaS subscription and account management
  • Stripe for subscription payment processing
  • Laravel Nova for an administrative dashboard
  • Git and GitHub for tracking code development, to-do items and feature branches
  • Upwork for hiring and paying a software code reviewer and consultant
  • Slack for coordinating with my contractor
  • TermsFeed for generating privacy policy and terms of service documents
  • Amazon Web Services for application hosting
  • Laravel Vapor for managing AWS setup and deployment
  • WordPress for building the WP Lookout marketing website
  • Matomo for privacy-focused analytics
  • HelpScout for managing user support interactions
  • MailerLite for handling new user onboarding and marketing automation

I’m not going to go in-depth on all of these tools, as some of them are pretty simple and self-evident in their value. Others are just magical and deserving of some additional observations. Here are some things that stood out and what I learned along the way:

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