Imagine a scenario where you want to send a weekly email to your customers (maybe a newsletter 💌). So you need to send that email at a specific day and time.

This post will walk through creating and sending automated emails with Masonite Framework.

What you’ll need

To code along with this post, you’ll need:

• Python (I’m using Python 3.6.5);
• Pipenv: Python Development Workflow for Humans;
• Masonite: The Modern And Developer Centric Python Web Framework
• Mailtrap.io: Email testing for dev teams;

Setting up your application

First, create a new directory and a Python virtualenv:

$ mkdir masonite-weekly-email
$ cd masonite-weekly-email
$ pipenv install --three
$ pipenv shell

After that, you'll need to install masonite-cli package and crafting a new
Masonite application.

$ pipenv install masonite-cli
$ craft new masonite_weekly_email .
$ craft install

This will create a new Masonite application inside your current directory (the use of . at the end of craft new command).

Creating and sending an Email

Masonite comes with email support out of the box 🎉. So you can easily send an email like this:

Mail.to('hello@email.com').template('mail/welcome').send()

Task Scheduling

Now that we are done with sending email, let's schedule it.
Masonite provides a package called masonite-scheduler. It enables your app to schedule cron tasks. First, you need to run a command to install the package:

$ pipenv install masonite-scheduler

The second command is a craft task command which will create a new task under the app/tasks directory.

$ craft task WeeklyEmail

Before running our task weekly, let's run it every 1 minute.

from scheduler.Task import Task

class WeeklyEmail(Task):

    run_every = '1 minute'

    def __init__(self, Mail):
        self.mail = Mail

    def handle(self):
        self.mail.subject('Build your next SaaS with Masonite 🚀')\
                .to('hello@email.com').template('mail/weekly')\
                .send()

Above, you send a email with a template located under mail folder. Create a file called weekly.html and put a random text inside.

<h2>Hello world!</h2>
<p><a href="https://github.com/MasoniteFramework/masonite">Masonite</a> is magic. ✨ </p>
<p>
    There are many benefits Masonite brings to your next SaaS project.
</p>
<img src="https://media.giphy.com/media/3o6Ztqh4JSlVqi2Z20/giphy.gif" alt="just do it">

Let's test this before setting up a cron job. Put your Mailtrap credentials into your .env file and run this command.

$ craft schedule:run

Let's Masonite fetch and run your task!

Let's put the right parameters and tell the task when it should run (remember a weekly email).

class WeeklyEmail(Task):
    run_every = '7 days'
    run_at = '17:00'

Cron Jobs

You need to set up the Cron Jobs to run automatically our tasks. Each crontab line must start with a time at which the command should be run and then the command:
So, to run command at 17:00 every monday, you'd do:

00 17 * * 1 command

You need to append && craft schedule:run to run your run the scheduled task.

Masonite Task Scheduling documentation page can provide further information. Just read it ✊!

If you want to contribute or interested in the development of Masonite then be sure to join the Slack channel or star the repo on GitHub.