4

I am developing a Ruby on Rails app, and have a staging server. But this staging server isn't sending any emails -- instead, it is discarding them.

In order to test our emails being sent, and how those emails looks like (so we can use the staging server for QA), I found MailCatcher. But currently it is focused on development environment, so there isn't support for neither HTTPS or authentication -- and I don't want to expose all MailCatcher emails for everyone.

Is there any ways to provide HTTPS and basic authentication through Apache or Nginx? Maybe a reverse proxy?

mailq
  • 17,023
  • 2
  • 37
  • 69
jmonteiro
  • 171
  • 1
  • 6
  • Yes it is possible. See in the upper right corner. There is a search box for "Nginx as reverse proxy", "Apache as HTTPS reverse proxy" or whatever you are trying to do. – mailq Sep 10 '11 at 20:51
  • Thanks mailq. I managed to do so, and created a tutorial explaining how I did (my answer below). – jmonteiro Sep 11 '11 at 05:14

2 Answers2

3

After some tries, and thanks to user mailq tip, I managed to use Apache 2.2 mod_proxy_balancer, mod_proxy and mod_proxy_http to reverse-proxy MailCatcher, being able to serve HTTPS and HTTP Basic Authentication Headers.

Some setup details:

  • Server is running Ubuntu 10.04 LTS
  • My mailcatcher gem dir is /usr/local/rvm/gems/ree-1.8.7-2011.03/gems/mailcatcher-0.5.1/public.
  • My server URL is mailcatcher.example.com.
  • I created a self-signed certificate on /etc/apache2/ssl/mailcatcher.example.com.pem and /etc/apache2/ssl/mailcatcher.example.com.key.
  • My HTTP BasicAuth username is theusername and password is s3cr3t.
  • User is called deploy.
  • MailCatcher needs to be manually turned on by the deploy user (in other words, Apache won't turn it on on it's own).

Create a htpasswd user/password file

mkdir -p /home/deploy/mailcatcher
htpasswd -cb /home/deploy/mailcatcher/htpasswd theusername s3cr3t

Write to /etc/apache2/sites-available/mailcatcher

<VirtualHost *:443>
  ServerName mailcatcher.example.com
  DocumentRoot /usr/local/rvm/gems/ree-1.8.7-2011.03/gems/mailcatcher-0.5.1/public
  SSLEngine On
  SSLCertificateFile /etc/apache2/ssl/mailcatcher.example.com.pem
  SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/apache2/ssl/mailcatcher.example.com.key
  <Directory /usr/local/rvm/gems/ree-1.8.7-2011.03/gems/mailcatcher-0.5.1/public>
    Allow from all
    Options -MultiViews
    FileEtag none
  </Directory>
  <LocationMatch "/"> 
    AuthType Basic 
    AuthName "MailCatcher" 
    AuthUserFile /home/deploy/mailcatcher/htpasswd
    Require valid-user
  </LocationMatch> 

  RequestHeader set X_FORWARDED_PROTO 'https'
  ProxyPassReverse / balancer://mailcatcher
  ProxyPreserveHost on
  ProxyRequests On
  ProxyPass / balancer://mailcatcher/

  <Proxy balancer://mailcatcher>
    Order deny,allow
    Allow from all
    BalancerMember http://127.0.0.1:1080
  </Proxy>
</VirtualHost>

Activate required Apache modules, site and restart apache

a2enmod ssl
a2enmod proxy_balancer
a2enmod proxy_http
a2ensite mailcatcher
service apache2 restart

Turn MailCatcher on

mailcatcher --ip 127.0.0.1 --smtp-port 1025 --http-port 1080

The last thing I did was to configure my Ruby on Rails app to send email using SMTP server 127.0.0.1, port 1025 (instead of the default port 25).

To accessy https://mailcatcher.example.com, with username theusername and password s3cr3t.

Community
  • 1
jmonteiro
  • 171
  • 1
  • 6
  • Check this answer for Apache 2.4: http://serverfault.com/questions/624113/apache-2-4-proxy-balancer-and-lbmethod-byrequest – adosaiguas Sep 20 '16 at 15:22
0

Try also http://mailtrap.io - it's a web based fake SMTP server like mailcatcher. But it doesn't require you to run SMTP server yourself and/or setup Apache.

It has permission management and authorization that are flexible enough.

Bogdan Gusiev
  • 593
  • 2
  • 6
  • 9