As a standalone app

On this page:

• Getting a license
  • Creating the application
  • Configuring vapor.yml
• Deploying to Vapor
  • Creating the first user
  • Configure the email sending service
  • Making sure everything works

You can create a new Laravel application with Mailcoach preinstalled into using Composer. This application will also have authorization screens (login, password reset) and user management.

Getting a license#

In order to install Mailcoach, you’ll need to get a license first.

Creating the application#

You can create the application with Mailcoach pre-installed using this command

composer create-project spatie/mailcoach-vapor

During the execution of this command Composer will ask for a user and a password. The user is the email address
of your spatie.be account. The password is the key of your Mailcoach license.

Configuring vapor.yml#

In vapor.yml you should set the id and name keys to the id and name of your Vapor project.

Mailcoach uses a database to store information. Make sure you have a provisioned a database in Vapor and specify its name in the database key. in vapor.yml.

Mailcoach uses Redis to reliably throttle API calls to email sending services. You should provision a Redis cache at Vapor and specify the name of your cache in vapor.yml

Deploying to Vapor#

With that setup out of the way, you should now be able to deploy the application to vapor

vapor deploy production

Creating the first user#

After the deploy is complete, you should create an initial user.

This can be done by executing vapor command production and give it this command.

mailcoach:make-user --username=<choose-your-username> --email=<choose-your-email>  --password=<choose-your-password> 

New users can be made on the users screen in mailcoach.

Configure the email sending service#

Now that you are logged in you must configure the email sending service you’d like to use. Here are set up instructions for:

• Amazon SES
• SendGrid
• Mailgun
• Postmark

⚠️ You should configure a mailer before creating your first email list.

Making sure everything works#

Before sending out a real campaign, we highly recommend creating a small email list with a couple of test email addresses and send a campaign to it. This way, you can verify that sending mails, and the open & click tracking are all working correctly.