A php library that collects email from a local postfix server so you can inspect, assert and otherwise mess around with emails sent during development.

Add mailhook to your development dependencies in composer.json:

{
  "require-dev": {
    "ingenerator/mailhook" : "~0.1@dev"
  }
}

You will also need to configure postfix to deliver all outbound mail to a local file. If you're using chef, see our postfix-relay cookbook, and configure the "postfix_relay.allow_live_email" attribute to false. To install manually, apt-get install postfix and then append to your postfix configuration as follows.

# /etc/postfix/main.cf
default_transport = fs_mail

# /etc/postfix/master.cf

#
# fs_mail sends all outgoing mail to a single local file
#
fs_mail    unix  -       n       n       -       -       pipe
   flags=FB user=ubuntu argv=tee -a /tmp/outgoing_mail.dump

Obviously you'd usually use mailhook inside a test framework of some kind (Behat, for example). But this very simple example should give you an idea of how you can use it:

$mailhook = new \Ingenerator\Mailhook\Mailhook('/tmp/outgoing_mail.dump');
// You'll usually want to purge the file before your tests, to ensure you have a clean state
$mailhook->purge();

run_my_code_that_should_send_emails();

$mailhook->refresh();

$mails = $mailhook->getEmails();
assert(count($mails) === 1, 'An email was sent');

You probably want to know more than just that an email with some content was sent to some user. For example, you might want to assert that an email was sent to a specific user. For this, you can use the matching/assertion framework built into the package:

$mail   = $mailhook->assert()->firstEmailMatching(new EmailSentToMatcher('test@ingenerator.com'));
$emails = $mailhook->assert()->emailsMatching(new EmailSentToMatcher('test@ingenerator.com'));
$mailhook->assert()->noEmailMatching(new AnyEmailMatcher);

These assertion methods throw an exception if they fail, or return the matching email(s) if they succeed. You can add your own custom criteria by implementing the EmailMatcher interface and providing an instance of the class.

You can pass multiple matchers to assert that an email matching all the criteria was sent. For example, if you were testing the common "password reset email" feature you could do something like:

$mailhook = new \Ingenerator\Mailhook\Mailhook('/tmp/outgoing_mail.dump');
$mailhook->purge();

submit_my_password_reset_form();

$mail = $mailhook->assert()->firstEmailMatching(
    new EmailSentToMatcher('test@ingenerator.com'),
    new EmailWithLinkMatcher('/reset/')
);
$links  = $mail->getLinksMatching('/reset/');

visit_page_and_reset_password($links[0]->getUrl());

mailhook has a suite of PhpSpec specifications. Run them with bin/phpspec run. Contributions will only be accepted if they are accompanied by well structured specs. Installing with composer should get you everything you need to work on the project.

mailhook is copyright 2012-2014 inGenerator Ltd and released under the BSD license.