Mailpit and Laravel Integration: A Complete Guide for Local Email Testing

Mailpit is a local email testing tool, similar to MailHog or MailCatcher, used by developers to capture and inspect emails sent by an application during development. It provides a web-based interface where you can view, search, and debug email messages without actually sending them to a live email server.

It is a very useful and developer friendly tool but there is no adequate documentation on how to set it up in a Laravel app. That's what we'll do today.

Basic Setup

• Install Mailpit: You can install it via Homebrew on macOS.

   brew install mailpit

If you are on Windows or Linux you can download the static binary. Read this guide for more information.

• Run Mailpit: Start the Mailpit server by running:

   mailpit

Or set it up to run automatically by running:

   brew services start mailpit

• Access Mailpit Web Interface: Open your browser and go to http://localhost:8025 to view incoming emails in the Mailpit UI.

Laravel Setup

Go to you .env file and input this setup

MAIL_MAILER=smtp
MAIL_HOST=localhost
MAIL_PORT=1025
MAIL_USERNAME=your username @ your system name here
MAIL_PASSWORD=null
MAIL_ENCRYPTION=null
MAIL_FROM_ADDRESS="hello@example.com"
MAIL_FROM_NAME="${APP_NAME}"

You can get your user and system name by running the following command

   echo "$(whoami)@$(hostname)"

That's all! Now whenever an email is sent from your laravel app you would be able to view it in the browser.