As a Developer Advocate for SparkPost, I write a lot of sample applications. My background is mostly front-end development, therefore my strongest language is JavaScript. Thanks to Node.js, I’m a decent backend developer as well. Does this mean I’m a full stack developer now?
Intro to Node.js
As a Developer Advocate for SparkPost, I write a lot of sample applications. My background is mostly front-end development, therefore my strongest language is JavaScript. Thanks to Node.js, I’m a decent backend developer as well. Does this mean I’m a full stack developer now? Anyway, it was important for me that we had an awesome SparkPost client library for Node.js. So, I dove right in and became a contributor (even before I was hired).
Allow me to help you get started sending emails with SparkPost on your Node.js project.
Installing & Setup
Sending Email
Now that you have a SparkPost instance, you’re ready to send. There are quite a few options available for sending, but let’s start with a simple example. Here’s how you send an email to a single recipient, specifying inline content:
client.transmissions.send({ content: { from: 'test@your-sending-domain.com', subject: 'Hello from node-sparkpost', html: '<p>Hello world</p>' }, recipients: [ {address: 'someone@somedomain.com'} ] }) .then(data => { console.log('Woohoo! You just sent your first mailing!') console.log(data) }) .catch(err => { console.log('Whoops! Something went wrong') console.log(err) })
Note: This example uses Promises, but don’t worry. We also support callback functions.
There are more options available with transmissions, including specifying stored templates or recipient lists, cc and bcc, adding attachments, specifying a campaign, using substitution data, and much more. Check out the examples, docs for the Transmissions resource, and the Transmissions API documentation for more info.
Bonus: Sending Email with Nodemailer
Nodemailer is a popular library for Node.js that make sending email “easy as cake.” For those of you choosing to use this library, we created a SparkPost transport for Nodemailer. You’ll need to install the nodemailer and nodemailer-sparkpost-transport packages in your project.
> npm install nodemailer nodemailer-sparkpost-transport --save
Now you can create a nodemailer transport instance:
const nodemailer = require('nodemailer') const sparkPostTransport = require('nodemailer-sparkpost-transport') const transporter = nodemailer.createTransport(sparkPostTransport({ 'sparkPostApiKey': process.env.SPARKPOST_API_KEY }))
Notice how I am reading the API Key from an environment variable. It’s still a best practice to never put that directly in your code.
There are several options that can passed into the SparkPost transport, like campaign id and whether or not the message is transactional. Take a look at the README.md for all the options.
Here’s how you’d send the same message above using Nodemailer:
transporter.sendMail({ from: 'test@your-sending-domain.com', to: 'someone@somedomain.com', subject: 'Hello from nodemailer-sparkpost-transport', html: '<p>Hello world</p>' }, (err, info) => { if (err) { console.error(err); } else { console.log(info); } })
Double Bonus: Sending Email with notif.me
We all know that email is king of communication but sometimes you want to be able to reach people via multiple channels. notif.me is a Node.js library for sending all kinds of transactional messages. Whether you want to send an email, sms, push, or webpushes, you can do it with ease. It also has built in fall and round robin strategies for multiple providers. We recently worked with the creators to build a SparkPost provider. You’ll need to install the `notifme-sdk` package in your project.
> npm install notifme-sdk --save
You can now create a notifme instance with the SparkPost provider:
const NotifmeSdk = require('notifme-sdk').default const notifmeSdk = new NotifmeSdk({ channels: { email: { providers: [{ type: 'sparkpost', apiKey: process.env.SPARKPOST_API_KEY, }] } } })
Again, we are pulling the API Key from an environment variable. We’ve said it three times — it’s that important. 🙂
Now let’s repeat this same example, this time using notif.me:
notifmeSdk.send({ email: { from: 'test@your-sending-domain.com', to: 'someone@somedomain.com', subject: 'Hello from the SparkPost notif.me provider', html: '<p>Hello world</p>' } }).then(console.log)
It’s really easy to use and I recommend looking at the other features.
There’s no wrong way to Node
When it comes to sending email using Node.js, you have many options. We’ve worked hard to help make it as painless as possible.
