Laravel Mailtrap Setup

Test emails easily with Laravel and Mailtrap

3 min readDec 18, 2021

Introduction

How will this email look? Will it look nice on mobile? Is the email data correct? You can test all that and more with Mailtrap.

Mailtrap is a testing tool designed to trap any emails coming out of your application. Setting up Mailtrap is a must for your development environment, this way you can test your application functionalities without worrying about spamming real users.

Step 1: Mailtrap Account

Go to https://mailtrap.io/ and sign up.
Once you are logged in you will see a menu with 3 options; Inboxes, API, and Billing. Go to Inboxes.

On the Inboxes page you will see a list of your inboxes and you will also have the option of creating a new project or creating a new inbox. We will use the default inbox for this setup.
Click on the inbox and on SMTP Settings select Integrations -> Laravel.

Here you will see the .env variables you need to copy.

Step 2: Laravel Configuration

Add (or replace) mail environment variables from Mailtrap to your application .env file.

MAIL_MAILER=smtp
MAIL_HOST=smtp.mailtrap.io
MAIL_PORT=2525
MAIL_USERNAME=YOUR_INBOX_USERNAME
MAIL_PASSWORD=YOUR_INBOX_PASSWORD
MAIL_ENCRYPTION=tls

# Also
MAIL_FROM_ADDRESS=no-reply@test.local
MAIL_FROM_NAME="Mailtrap Test App"

Step 3: Test

Create simple test mailable with markdown.

php artisan make:mail MailtrapTest --markdown=emails.test

App\Mail\MailtrapTest.php

resources\views\emails\test.blade.php (Markdown file)

@component('mail::message')
# TEST EMAIL

The cake is a lie

Thanks,<br>
{{ config('app.name') }}
@endcomponent

Add test route

...
...

Route::get('/mailtrap/test', function () {
    // Using a temp email. 
    // This way we can test that emails are really trapped.
    $testEmail = 'rognodugni@vusra.com';

    return Mail::to($testEmail)->send(new MailtrapTest());
});

...
...

Now hit test URL. You should have a new email on your Mailtrap inbox and you should not have any email from your application on the test email inbox.

Conclusion

Mailtrap is a very useful tool for development and it’s super easy to set up with Laravel. You can find more information at https://mailtrap.io/blog/send-email-in-laravel/.

I hope this article was helpful.

If you have any feedback or found mistakes, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me.