CODEWITHSUNDEEP
meteormandrill
fuzzybabybunny
fuzzybabybunny

Reputation: 5254

Meteor says the MAIL_URL variable is not set, but it is

I'm using this Mandrill package:

https://atmospherejs.com/wylio/mandrill

When I try to send an email I get this error:

I20150423-22:09:09.078(-7)? ====== BEGIN MAIL #0 ======
I20150423-22:09:09.078(-7)? (Mail not sent; to enable sending, set the MAIL_URL environment variable.)
I20150423-22:09:09.079(-7)? MIME-Version: 1.0
I20150423-22:09:09.079(-7)? From: [email protected]
I20150423-22:09:09.079(-7)? To: [email protected]
I20150423-22:09:09.079(-7)? Subject: Something something
I20150423-22:09:09.079(-7)? Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
I20150423-22:09:09.079(-7)? Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
I20150423-22:09:09.079(-7)? 
I20150423-22:09:09.079(-7)? Some kind of message content.
I20150423-22:09:09.079(-7)? ====== END MAIL #0 ======

So I go into the Meteor Shell and I get this:

> process.env.MAIL_URL
'smtp://MY_MANDRILL_EMAIL:[email protected]:587/'

Uh, so the MAIL_URL variable IS being set....

Just to be sure, I put this in a mailer.js file under the server folder.

Meteor.startup(function () {
  process.env.MAIL_URL = 'smtp://MY_MANDRILL_EMAIL:[email protected]:587/';
});

The same error happens. This is just running everything in localhost.

EDIT - I got it working, but I don't know why I'm doing this:

I noticed through some console logging that the email was trying to be shot off before the environmental variable was being set, despite setting the environmental variable inside of Meteor.startup()

What I ended up doing was creating a mailer_variable.js file inside server/lib

process.env.MAIL_URL = 'smtp://MY_MANDRILL_EMAIL:[email protected]:587';
console.log('this is the mail_url: ', process.env.MAIL_URL);

This works. But I'm not sure why. It certainly isn't what the Mandrill package author says I should be doing...

Upvotes: 4

Views: 3476

Answers (1)

Peter Ilfrich
Peter Ilfrich

Reputation: 3816

I believe this has to do with the load order of Meteor. I don't recommend setting environment variables in the startup script precisely for this reason.

The correct way to set this is on Linux/Mac is to start Meteor like this:

MAIL_URL="smtp://.../" meteor

or 

export MAIL_URL="smtp://.../"
meteor

More details are documented here: http://meteorpedia.com/read/Environment_Variables

Upvotes: 2

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