This is the second part of a 2 series tutorial to setup action mailbox with postfix. In this part, we will configure postfix in production server to forward incoming emails to our rails app so action mailbox can process it.
If you haven't read the first part where we setup action mailbox and test it in development, you can read it here
You should have
- Postfix configured in production server (same server as your rails app)
- Existing app built with rails 6
- Ruby with rbenv setup
- Patience
Steps
Login to your production server first and then;
Step 1: Create bash script
Create a script inside
/usr/local/bin/
to forward all incoming emails to our rails appshell
$ nano email_forwarder.sh
Add following to the script
shell
#!/bin/sh
export HOME=YOUR_HOME_PATH
export PATH=YOUR_PATH
export RBENV_ROOT=YOUR_RBENV_PATH
cd /path/to/your/project && bin/rails action_mailbox:ingress:postfix URL='https://truemark.com.np/rails/action_mailbox/relay/inbound_emails' INGRESS_PASSWORD='YOUR_INGRESS_PASSWORD'
Replace value of
HOME
, PATH
, RBENV_ROOT
, URL
and INGRESS_PASSWORD
as described below:- Copy your home directory for
HOME
cd
and copy what you get from pwd
commandshell
$ cd
$ pwd
- Copy what you get from
and$PATH
command forwhich rbenv
andPATH
respectivelyRBENV_PATH
shell
$ $PATH
$ which rbenv
- Copy the password you added to
or yourcredentials
|ENV
file forapplication.yml
INGRESS_PASSWORD
For
URL
, if your application lived at https://example.com
, the full command would look like this:bin/rails action_mailbox:ingress:postfix URL=https://example.com/rails/action_mailbox/relay/inbound_emails INGRESS_PASSWORD=YOUR_STRONG_PASSWORD
Step 2: Configure Postfix to Pipe Incoming emails to script
We will follow steps as described here.
Create
/etc/postfix/virtual_aliases
to add a catch-all alias; localuser needs to be an existing local user:file
# /etc/postfix/virtual_aliases
@mydomain.tld localuser@mydomain.tld
- Create `/etc/postfix/transport` to add a transport mapping. "forward_to_rails" can be whatever you want; it will be used later in `master.cf`
file
# /etc/postfix/transport
mydomain.tld forward_to_rails:
- Next, both transport and virtual_aliases need to be compiled into berkeley db files:
shell
$ sudo postmap /etc/postfix/virtual_aliases
$ sudo postmap /etc/postfix/transport
- Add the transport to
/etc/postfix/master.cf
file
# /etc/postfix/master.cf
forward_to_rails unix - n n - - pipe
flags=Xhq user=deploy:deploy argv=/usr/local/bin/email_forwarder.sh
${nexthop} ${user}
We should specify user so script is run by that user and not postfix or nobody.
user=deploy:deploy` ~ `user=user:group
- Add following in
/etc/postfix/main.cf
file
# /etc/postfix/main.cf
transport_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/transport
virtual_alias_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/virtual_aliases
You can view postfix log with
tail -f /var/log/mail.log
You must have everything now to receive email in your rails app. Test it with any of your email provider; just send the email to
[email protected]
and check if it is being received in the log. If you have any comments or suggestions, please let me know in comments below.References
- https://guides.rubyonrails.org/action_mailbox_basics.html
- https://serverfault.com/questions/258469/how-to-configure-postfix-to-pipe-all-incoming-email-to-a-script
Previously published at https://thedevpost.com/blog/setup-action-mailbox-with-postfix-part-2/