Postal is a complete and fully featured mail server for use by websites & web servers. Think Sendgrid, Mailgun or Postmark but open source and ready for you to run on your own servers.

Getting Started With the Development

1. Clone the project

git clone https://github.com/missioninbox/postal
cd postal
git checkout dev

2. Install rvm and ruby

curl -sSL https://get.rvm.io | bash -s stable
rvm install "ruby-3.2.2"

3. Install local mysql-server

sudo apt install mysql-server
sudo mysql_secure_installation
sudo mysql
mysql> ALTER USER 'myuser'@'%' IDENTIFIED BY 'StrongPass123!';
mysql> create database postal;

4. Configure project console and check for validity

source ~/.rvm/scripts/rvm
which ruby
which gem
ruby -v
gem -v

If that works, make sure RVM loads by default when you open a shell. Usually you add this line to ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc:

[[ -s "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm" ]] && source "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm"

5. Install project dependencies

gem install bundler
bundle install

If you face mysql gem installation issue, run the following.

sudo apt update

# 2) MySQL client headers (for mysql2)
sudo apt install -y build-essential pkg-config
sudo apt install -y default-libmysqlclient-dev

# Optional but often needed by other gems:
sudo apt install -y libssl-dev zlib1g-dev

Run bundle install again.

6. Install foreman

gem install foreman

7. Create postal configuration

mkdir config/postal
cp config/examples/development.yml config/postal/postal.yml
./bin/postal initialize

Update config/postal/postal.yml with your DB credential.

8. Run the dev script

./bin/dev

If you are having issues binding local 25 port to this project (with Access Denied error), update the port to 2525 on the postal.yml file with the following.

smtp_server:
  default_port: 2525
  max_connections: 1000
  connection_threads: 20

Use ./bin/postal --help to see how to create the user using postal cli.

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