handlebars-email-html-previewer VS handlebars.js

Writing HTML, and sending it with nodemailer is kinda a pain compared to sending emails with SendGrid. So I wrote a small tool that allows for live previewing of your HTML mail with handlebars. You can: - code it, and see a preview live - add in test data to mimick e.g. your nodemailer setup - send a testmail to your mailtrap account if you need some extra info, or just want to see how it looks in a mailclient. Repo - https://github.com/nsmet/handlebars-email-html-previewer Live demo - https://handlebars-email-html-previewer.vercel.app/

You can see the client code here and the server code that connects with Mailtrap here.

If you have a bit of Nodejs SSR background, you would already be accustomed to templating libraries like Pug, Handlebars, EJS, etc. If you’re from a PHP background you would be familiar with the Blade templating engine. These templating libraries basically help you render dynamic data from the backend on the frontend. They also help you generate markup with loops based on conditions.

It’s time to create our code template. To do this, we use handlebars js, which allows us to create templates at a basic level. We create a folder called templates in the project home directory and add our template files inside.

Templating engine: SSGs rely on templating engines to define the structure of web pages. These engines enable developers to create reusable templates and incorporate dynamic content. Popular templating engines include Liquid, Handlebars, Mustache, EJS, ERB, HAML, and Slim.

Here's our first usage of the handlebars (docs) template. The .hbs extension will be removed once we run the action. Inside index.ts.hbs, add:

Id use handlerbars JS - https://handlebarsjs.com/

Node.js programming language will be used for simplicity. Handlebars template engine to separate data from the presentation. html2pdf.app to convert HTML to PDF, but as an alternative Puppeteer can be used also (you can find a complete tutorial How to convert HTML to PDF with puppeteer).

Handlebars.js site

But a valid question is: Why not use a template like Handlebars? For the use case inside Woovi, templates won't help us because we would need two core points: reuse our design system and ensure the usage of GraphQL in our payment link.

You might want to brush up on https://handlebarsjs.com/ if you want to make templates.

Once the package is set up, it will provide a MailService class that has a method named sendEmail that will receive some parameters and then send the mail. But first, we need to create the mail template and for that, we will use handlebars. It will allow us, to create HTML templates in which we can pass dynamics parameters, such as the user name or its information, and write inline CSS to style our email.