Aim

Requirements

  • reasonably fresh dokku host

Why

Although an old craft, sending and receiving e-mail is not necessarily an easy task. Many different clients shall render the result nicely and sending itself needs some special care to not end up in spam folders.

There are multiple open source solutions to tackle the design/layout and receipients management problems. One of them is mailtrain which includes some relatively slick editor tools (mosaico and grapejs) that allow users to achieve good results without understanding much of HTML and CSS. The state of the solution itself is pretty old, with a version 2 in beta since ever.

As dokku is a cool deployment solution, I’ll outline the process to install mailtrain on a dokku host here.

Prepare the deployable code

Checkout the mailtrain code

git clone https://github.com/Mailtrain-org/mailtrain
cd mailtrain

Prepare the configuration file

cp config/default.toml config/production.toml
git add -f config/production.toml # attention, this file should never see the
                                  # public!
git commit -m "cp config/default.toml config/production.toml"

# Adjust basic values if you want
vim config/production.toml
git add config/production.toml
git commit -m "basic configuration"

Prepare the dokku host

Create skeleton app

dokku apps:create mailtrain

MySQL

Plugin installation

If you have not yet installed the dokku plugin, do so

dokku plugin:install https://github.com/dokku/dokku-mysql.git mysql

dokku mysql:create mailtrain
dokku mysql:link mailtrain mailtrain

Redis

Plugin installation

If you have not yet installed the dokku plugin, do so

dokku plugin:install https://github.com/dokku/dokku-redis.git redis

dokku redis:create mailtrain
dokku redis:link mailtrain mailtrain

Adjust the mailtrain configuration

Both the redis:create/link and the mysql:create/link commands executed earlier create output containing host, name and credentials for the service.

If you cannot access the output anymore, dokku redis:info mailtrain (and dokku mysql:info mailtrain) will provide it again (look for the dsn line).

Edit the mailtrain configuration accordingly:

vim config/production.toml
# [mysql] host,user,password,database
# [redis] host,password(uncomment)
git add
git commit -m "configure dokku redis and mysql databases"

Add volumes

Create folders on host to mount in guest.

mkdir -p /var/lib/dokku/data/storage/mailtrain/grapejs_uploads/
mkdir -p /var/lib/dokku/data/storage/mailtrain/mosaico_uploads/
mkdir -p /var/lib/dokku/data/storage/mailtrain/reports/

dokku storage:mount mailtrain /var/lib/dokku/data/storage/mailtrain/reports:/app/protected/reports
dokku storage:mount mailtrain /var/lib/dokku/data/storage/mailtrain/grapejs_uploads:/app/public/grapejs/uploads
dokku storage:mount mailtrain /var/lib/dokku/data/storage/mailtrain/mosaico_uploads:/app/public/mosaico/uploads

# docker deploy needs containers permissions
chown -R dokku:dokku /var/lib/dokku/data/storage/mailtrain/

Deploy

Now it is time to push your mailtrain instance for deployment:

# in mailtrain source
git remote add online dokku@yourdokkuhost:mailtrain
git push online master

Add a domain

If you want an additional domain, add it

dokku domains:add mailtrain newsletter.mydokku.host

letsencrypt it

The letsencrypt plugin needs special treatment for Dockerfile deploys.

Following the readme, we map the ports for certificate fetching

# install, if you have not yet:
# dokku plugin:install https://github.com/dokku/dokku-letsencrypt.git

dokku proxy:ports-add mailtrain http:80:5555
dokku lentsencrypt mailtrain
dokku proxy:ports-add mailtrain https:443:3000
dokku proxy:ports-remove mailtrain http:5555:5555

Enjoy!

Your mailtrain instance should be up and running. Follow the documentation to configure it. The language can be changed in the config/production.toml file only and the language code has to match the files in languages. Commit and push to update the configuration.

Final Thoughts

dokku will attempt a deployment based on the Dockerfile in the code repository. This is fine, although the idea of even more standardized buildpacks charms me more and leads to less hazzle (e.g. with letsencrypt setup). However, I couldnt get the default buildpacks run mailtrain nicely. I would blame the still very busy nodejs ecosystem (grunt, nodeversion, blabla).

Putting sensitive configuration in a git repository is not the optimal solution here, but allowed us to fire up the application quickly.

It would be great if mailtrain supported setting the database urls via a single environment variable (it does allow environment callbacks in its configuration file, though - so feel free to do that, via dokku config:set).

Heroku, dokku and at least Ruby on Rails set and read DATABASE_URL, which would make the manual database configuration obsolete. I filed an issue on mailtrain, but the project is most likely busy with v2; but anyone js should be able to craft a PR pretty quickly.

Having a better idea?

Awesome! Get in contact with me!