Background
MailHog is a fantastic utility for intercepting email on a hosted server and popular with the Laravel community. Alternatives for MailHog exists, e.g.:
Our recommendation is if you’re developing locally to use HELO due to it’s superior Laravel integration, for example it’s ability to show the view blades in the debug tab.
But what do you do when you want to catch mail on a Forge server? This guide is designed to give you a quick path for doing that. The guide consists of installing the software, creating a new Linux systemd service, and then adjusting the Forge firewall to make it work.
Installation
This must be performed as root
sudo apt-get -y install golang-go go get github.com/mailhog/MailHog
The default installation needs root and will install the MailHog binary in ~/go/bin/MailHog
To get it running on every startup, do the following two things:
1. Create a new systemd service
cat >/etc/systemd/system/mailhog.service <<EOL [Unit] Description=MailHog service [Service] ExecStart=/root/go/bin/MailHog [Install] WantedBy=multi-user.target EOL
2. Enable automatic startup for systemd service
systemctl enable mailhog
Starting Mailhog
You can now use systemctl start mailhog to start MailHog or systemctl status mailhog to see if it worked.
What Ports Do MailHog Use?
MailHog uses port 1025 for SMTP and port 8025 for it’s HTTP interface. These must be allowed on the Forge firewall before it will work.
Forge Firewall Configuration
Below is a screenshot of the Laravel Forge firewall configuration. Be sure to add both ports 1025 and 8025 to the Forge configuration.
