Inspect and Develop Mail Templates with Laravel Mailbook

Published on January 10th, 2023 by Paul Redmond

Laravel Mailbook is a package that lets you quickly inspect your mail templates without triggering them in your application. Given that the mail is rendered in a browser, it allows you to quickly tweak styles, text, and localization without having to fire a mailable over and over again:

This package works by installing it via composer and then running the provided mailbook:install command to set up a routes/mailbook.php route file where you can register emails.

// routes/mailbook.php
 
// This will use dependency injection if your mailable has parameters
Mailbook::add(VerificationMail::class);
 
// Use a closure to customize the parameters of the mail instance
Mailbook::add(function (): VerificationMail {
    $user = User::factory()->make();
 
    return new VerificationMail($user, '/example/url')
});

One of the coolest features I noticed when checking out this package is Variants, which you can use to provide multiple scenarios for the same mailable or notification:

// routes/mailbook.php
 
// Use a closure to customize the parameters of the mail instance
Mailbook::add(OrderCreatedMail::class)
    ->variant('1 item', function () {
        return new OrderCreatedMail(
            Order::factory()->withOneProduct()->create()
        );
    })
    ->variant('2 items', function () {
        return new OrderCreatedMail(
            Order::factory()->withTwoProducts()->create()
        );
    });