Preview your notification emails in Laravel 5.4

If you want to preview you mails in browser to see how they would ideally look in the recipient’s inbox you can set that up in a few lines of code in your routes file.

The solution is a Frankenstein mashup of tips from two different sources. One was a great tip from Adam Wathan(above) and the other a solution by TiBian on a Laracast thread because Laravel Notifications are now in markdown by default.

The snippet below assumes you have created a notification called TestNotification that has no data passed to it.

// routes/web.php
$this->get(‘preview-notification’, function () {
    
   $message = (new \App\Notifications\TestNotification())->toMail('test@email.com');
    
    $markdown = new \Illuminate\Mail\Markdown(view(), config(‘mail.markdown’));
    return $markdown->render(‘vendor.notifications.email’, $message->toArray());
});

I hope this nudges you in the right direction.