Installing MailCatcher on NixOS Latest

MailCatcher is a tool that allows you to catch and view all the emails sent by your application during development. This is particularly useful to test email functionalities without having to send real emails from your application.

In this tutorial, we will guide you through the process of installing MailCatcher on NixOS Latest.

Prerequisites

Before you start, make sure that you have:

  • A NixOS Latest installation running on your machine
  • sudo privileges

Installation steps

  1. Open a terminal window on your machine.

  2. Install the required packages by running the following command:

    sudo nix-env -i ruby

    This will install the Ruby programming language, which is required by MailCatcher.

  3. Install MailCatcher by running the following command:

    sudo gem install mailcatcher

    This will download and install MailCatcher on your machine.

  4. Start MailCatcher by running the following command:

    mailcatcher

    This will start MailCatcher on your machine.

  5. Verify that MailCatcher is running by opening a web browser and navigating to the following URL:

    http://127.0.0.1:1080/

    This will open the MailCatcher web interface, where you can view any emails sent by your application.

  6. To configure your application to use MailCatcher, you need to update its email settings to use the following SMTP server configuration:

    SMTP Host: localhost 
SMTP Port: 1025

    Note that this configuration is specific to MailCatcher and may differ from other SMTP server configurations.

Conclusion

Congratulations! You have successfully installed MailCatcher on NixOS Latest. You can now use MailCatcher to test email functionalities in your application during development.