When developing a Laravel application, sending and testing emails is often required. MailHog is a simple email-catching service that helps you test outgoing emails locally without actually sending them to real email addresses. In this guide, we will walk through how to set up MailHog with Laravel Sail, Laravel's official Docker environment for local development.
Why MailHog?
MailHog captures all outgoing emails in your application and displays them in a web interface.
Prerequisites
Laravel application set up with Laravel Sail.
Docker and Docker Compose installed.
Step 1: Add MailHog Service to Laravel Sail
Open your
docker-compose.ymlfileAdd MailHog configuration
services:
# Other services like Laravel, MySQL, etc.
mailhog:
image: mailhog/mailhog
ports:
- "1025:1025" # SMTP
- "8025:8025" # Web interface
This configuration will start MailHog, exposing SMTP on port 1025 and the web interface on port 8025
Step 2: Update Laravel Environment Configuration
Modify your .env file to use MailHog for email testing. Set the following mail settings:
MAIL_MAILER=smtp
MAIL_HOST=mailhog
MAIL_PORT=1025
MAIL_USERNAME=null
MAIL_PASSWORD=null
MAIL_ENCRYPTION=null
This configuration tells Laravel to use MailHog as the mail server for local email sending.
Step 3: Start Sail Services
Run the following command to start Sail with MailHog:
sail up -d
This will start all the services defined in your docker-compose.yml file, including MailHog.
Step 4: Test MailHog Setup
Send a test email from your Laravel application.
Mail::to($user)->send(new EmailVerificationToken());
Step 5: Check the MailHog web interface
Open your browser and navigate to http://localhost:8025. You should see your test email in MailHog's web interface, confirming that MailHog is capturing emails correctly.