On the SitePoint PHP blog they've continued their series covering the SparkPost mail delivery service and integrating it in to your application. In this latest part of the series author Christopher Pitt starts looking at the SparkPost API and uses it as a chance to practice some TDD (Test Driven Development) skills.

In a previous post, we looked at SparkPost (as an alternative to Mandrill), and explored a bit of the official PHP client. The official client handles a decent amount of work, but I got to thinking about what it would take to build a new client.

The more I thought about it, the more it made sense. I could learn about the SparkPost API, and practice Test Driven Development at the same time. So, in this post we’ll look to do just that!

He uses a few different libraries to explore the API and its endpoints: Guzzle for the HTTP requests and the Mockery+PHPUnit combination for the testing. He includes the setup and configuration for the testing environment and some sample tests for making sure things are connected. He then integrates Mockery into the testing, using it to mock the Guzzle requests and still have the tests pass even without the actual connection. He then works through several other tests and finishes the post with a mention of building coverage results for the "Client" class.

Matt Stauffer has a post to his site for the Laravel users out there wanting to seed "transactional emails" from their applications. In this tutorial he shows you how to use the SparkPost service to send emails with very little effort.

Recently, Mandrill announced that they'd be sunsetting their transactional email service and instead rolling it in to a secondary service for paid MailChimp users. That's fine for them, but many of us were using it for small one-off apps and weren't interested in all of a sudden paying money to send 100 emails a month.

[...] But right when Mandrill announced their pricing change, a new transactional email provider came out of nowhere: SparkPost. [...] So let's walk through the process of signing up and moving Giscus, my app for notifying you of comments on your gists, from Mandrill to SparkPost.

First he walks you through the process of getting a SparkPost account set up and configured to receive messages from your application. He then moves over to the Laravel side, upgrades his installed version and configures it with the "secret" value SparkPost provides and changes the MAIL_DRIVER value - that's basically it.. He also includes some screenshots of other parts of the SparkPost admin interface to show some of the other functionality included.

The SitePoint PHP blog has a post to their site introducing SparkPost, an email delivery service (in the same vein as Mandrill) that you can hook into your PHP applications to prevent the need to run your own mail servers.

I’ve used Mandrill for as long as I can remember. It sends transactional email, like the kind you receive when you sign up for a new account. Like me, many have been happy to use a free account for sending a relatively low number of emails a month. That is, until recently, when Mandrill caused a bit of a stir. The heart of the matter is that Mandrill removed their free tier. Anybody wishing to send mail through Mandrill now requires a paid-for MailChimp account

[...] Mindful that people are looking for alternatives (to power their personal newsletters or whatever), I spoke to Aydrian Howard. Aydrian is the Developer Advocate at SparkPost, whom I met at FluentConf. We talked for a bit about SparkPost and what makes it different from MailChimp.

After the little bit of Q&A about the service, the tutorial gets in and shows you how to get SparkPost set up for your application. They help you install their own client library and send a first test email using your account. Code is provided showing the configuration of the client with your key and the options you can define when sending the message.