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Grunt Email Design Workflow

Designing and testing emails is a pain. HTML tables, inline CSS, various devices, clients and support for the latest web standards.

This grunt task helps simplify things at the design stage.

  1. Compiles your SCSS to CSS

  2. Builds your email templates

  3. Inlines your CSS

  4. Sends you a test email to your inbox

Requirements

  • Node.js - Install Node.js
  • Grunt-cli and Grunt (npm install grunt-cli -g)
  • Ruby - Install ruby with RVM
  • Premailer (gem install premailer hpricot nokogiri) - Inlines the CSS
  • Mailgun - Sends the email (free for 10,000 emails/mth)

Getting started

If you haven't used Grunt before check out Chris Coyier's post on getting started with Grunt.

Clone this repo, cd to the directory, run npm install to install the necessary packages.

git clone https://github.com/leemunroe/grunt-email-design.git
cd grunt-email-design
npm install
grunt

How it works

CSS

This project uses SCSS. You don't need to touch the .css files, these are compiled automatically.

For changes to CSS, modify the .scss files.

Email templates and content

Handlebars is used for templating.

/layouts contains the standard header/footer HTML markup. You most likely will only need one layout template, but you can have as many as you like.

/emails is where your email content will go. To start you off I've included two simple transactional emails based on my simple HTML email template.

Generate your email templates

In terminal, run grunt. This will:

  • Compile your SCSS to CSS
  • Generate your email layout and content
  • Inline your CSS

See the output in the dist folder. Open it and preview it the browser.

Alternatively run grunt watch. This will check for any changes you make to your .scss and .hbs templates, then automatically run the tasks. Saves you having to run grunt every time.

Send the email to yourself

  • Sign up for a Mailgun account (it's free)
  • Open up Gruntfile.js
  • Replace 'MAILGUN_KEY' with your actual Mailgun API key
  • Change the sender and recipient to your own email address (or whoever you want to send it to)

Run grunt send --template=transaction.html. This will run the tasks as above, but also email out the email template you specify.

Change 'transaction.html' to the name of the email template you want to send.

How to test with Litmus

If you have a Litmus account and want to test the email in multiple clients/devices, create a new test in Litmus, copy the email address they tell you to send the email to, open up Gruntfile.js and paste it where the recipient goes. Then run grunt send --template=TEMPLATE_NAME.html to send the email to Litmus.