One of the things I missed the most after going 100% on Vagrant
was the ability to preview Rails apps sent mails on my browser. I got used to the
awesome letter_opener gem which depends
on launchy to fire up a new browser
window with the email preview instead of sending. As launchy on its own wouldn’t
be able to open up a browser window on the host machine from the guest box, I started
to look around for alternatives and wasn’t able to find something else that worked
for me.
To work around launchy, I first thought of overwriting the executable on the guest
machine as I did with notify-send
but I then realized that letter_opener
does not use the executable
and this approach wouldn’t work. That was when I eventually came across
this pull request and went through
with the idea of creating a Rails Engine to provide a web interface to browse
sent mails and letter_opener_web
was born.
After almost 3 weeks, ~46 commits and testing on 3 different projects, today I was able to release an RC for what I believe should be a 1.0 version. I’m keeping it as a RC until I have the chance to try it out on a couple more projects.
Since the gem has been downloaded ~390 times as of now I’m also waiting for some feedback. If you have any, feel free to drop a comment here or report an issue on GitHub.
UPDATE (06 FEB 2013): I finally had the chance to try it out on another project and ended up fixing a bug that was present since its early stages. I’ve released the final version and added a demo app using tiny-rails in case you want to try it out.