On the Laravel News site today there's a tutorial posted showing you how to test your middleware with HTTP tests and how they can help in more practical testing of your application.

In this post, I’d like to demonstrate a practical example of testing a middleware using HTTP tests. Testing at the HTTP level can make your tests more resilient to change and more readable.

On a recent episode of Full Stack Radio (#72) with Adam Wathan and Taylor Otwell, it was refreshing to hear them find a lot of practical value in HTTP testing. I have found HTTP tests to be easier to write and maintain, but did feel like I was Doing Testing Wrong™ somehow or that I was cheating by not mocking and isolating everything. If you haven’t listened to this episode yet, give it a listen, it’s full of good, practical testing advice.

He starts by laying out the example middleware he wanted to test, one for validating and securing webhooks coming back from the Mailgun service to handle incoming email. The code for the middleware is included, defining the handle, buildSignature and verify methods. He then uses the artisan command to make a test and provides the code to test and ensure that the middleware forbids requests that aren't POST.

The Laravel News site has posted a tutorial showing you how to handle inbound email using the framework and Mailgun's inbound routing feature (essentially webhooks)

I recently needed the ability to receive emails and process attachments on those emails. I love Mailgun for the sending of transactional email, so when I needed to process incoming mail I started digging into Mailgun closer and realized their powerful inbound routing email features!

Come along and learn how you can set up a webhook to process inbound email and secure it within your Laravel applications. We will even use Laravel Valet (or ngrok directly) to test it out locally!

They start by talking about inbound routing: what it is and how it works using a request back from the Mailgun service. They briefly walk you through the setup of a Mailgun account and your DNS to use it for mail service. Next they create a new Laravel project, configure it for email with Mailgun and create the hook the webhook from Mailgun will reach back out to. They use Valet to share it via ngrok and configure the Mailgun account with the resulting URL. The post finishes up showing how to secure the webook via validation middleware and how to test it. They also share a few tips you can potentially use in the controller like using jobs for response handling and working with files.

The TutsPlus.com site has posted a tutorial today showing you how to use the "Store" functionality in Mailgun from your PHP application to temporarily handle your incoming emails.

In today's episode, Mailgun stepped in to sponsor a tutorial about how I integrated its message routing and Store() API to handle replies from users.

For example, when people receive meeting requests from others with Meeting Planner, they may just choose to reply and send a note like they would to a typical email thread. [...] Sounds complicated, but one of Meeting Planner's goals is to reduce the back and forth emails between people about planning and consolidate real-time changes into fewer notifications.

The start by introducing the Mailgun service and, more specifically, the Store() offering it provides. He uses a Yii2 framework based application to show the integration. Once the MX (mail) records are set up correctly it can then hook back in to your mail servers or web application. The code is included to make the migration to hold the notification info, make the POST request back to the application and use background process to handle the mail processing.

On the Scotch.io site today there's a new tutorial giving you the ultimate guide to sending emails in Laravel - from choosing your provider out to sending both text and HTML emails (some with attachments).

Sending emails in web applications has become so essential. Marketing, notifications, newsletters, adverts, etc are some of the reasons why we send emails to our clients. I'd say the majority of websites send automated emails at least via a "Contact us" form.

Let's explore the many possible ways to send emails in a Laravel application.

They start off with a brief look at three different services you can set up out of the box with Laravel: Mailgun (for regular sending), Mailtrap (for debugging) and Mandrill (for bulk emails). They show you how to configure each service in Laravel and setting one of them up as the default. The tutorial then gets into sending the actual emails through a simple EmailController::send endpoint. They show the code to set up the Mail. They show examples of what the resulting emails look like and how they show up in the related mail services. There's also instructions on attaching files, using queues to optimize email sending and a "bonus" about sending bulk emails with MailChimp.

In this post to his site Tyler Longren shows how to use Composer to install WordPress plugins as well as the usual libraries.

I love Composer. It just makes including libraries or scripts in your app incredibly easy. So easy that it’s stupid not to use it (in many, if not most cases).

[...] I'd never used Composer with a proprietary WordPress plugin before. The plugin is for a client so it’ll never be available to the public. Here’s the steps I took to make this WordPress plugin compatible with Composer so that I can easily bring in third-party libraries.

He breaks it down into a five step process, showing the installation of the Mailgun PHP client:

• Install composer on your server
• Add Mailgun as a dependency
• Check your composer.json file
• Tell composer to install Mailgun
• Autoload Our Mailgun Classes in Our Plugin

With the help of Composer, the Mailgun client is ready to go and accessible in his WordPress instance, quickly and easily.

In a new tutorial posted to the NetTuts.com site they show you an alternative method for sending emails from your PHP application: using the Mailgun API. This API provides an interface into the Mailgun service, specifically made for sending emails without the hassles of hosting your own email server.

Over the past couple years I've run into various frustrations with both open source email list applications and paid cloud-based providers. In this tutorial, I'll guide you through my adoption of Mailgun.com, an economical solution I've been using successfully now for two years. [...] Mailgun is a cloud-based SaaS email cannon, like SendGrid. It's actually free for up to 10,000 emails per month. Mailgun is incredibly powerful and offers a well-documented API in a variety of popular languages. It provides for both send and receive capabilities, the latter of which can be quite difficult to develop from scratch. While Mailgun doesn't provide templates for rich HTML newsletters, it provides a platform upon which you can build anything.

He shows you how to use the service using a simple "ListApp" application (found on GitHub here) that provides some of the most common email list management functionality. He shows you how to set up a free Mailgun account and where to find their PHP SDK for the PHP integration. He then gets into the code examples, showing how to connect to the API via the SDK and doing tasks such as:

• Creating and update a mailing list
• Importing members to a list
• Showing a list of current list subscribers
• Send a new message
• Synchronizing lists and members

He ends the post with a quick section about extending the ListApp application (or the PHP SDK) with a suggestion to add better error reporting or a queue system to manage the remote API requests more efficiently.