So, I created a simple API that sends an activation email to the user's email address. The user will have to click on the activation link to activate their account.
In this article, I want to share my code on how to setup the Gmail SMTP in Nodemailer for creating user activation API.
Environment Variables
This is the code for env file
/.env.local
EMAIL_SMTP_SECURE=true
EMAIL_SMTP_PASS="****************"
EMAIL_SMTP_USER="*****@gmail.com"
EMAIL_SMTP_PORT=587
EMAIL_SMTP_HOST="smtp.gmail.com"
EMAIL_SMTP_SERVICE_NAME="Gmail"
CLIENT_HOST="http://localhost:3001"The EMAIL_SMTP_PASS you have to put is the 16 digits password of an Application Specific Password that you can generate from your Gmail account. You can learn more about how to use Nodemailer with Gmail SMTP from the Nodemailer blog in this link nodemailer using gmail. I recommend you are using 2FA for your Gmail account and generate an Application Specific Password for your application. Because using your Gmail password directly in your application is not secure.
If you are not familiar with the Application Specific Password, you can follow this link support.google.com to learn more about it.
Transporter Object
This is the code for the transporter object
// create configuration for nodemailer transporter object
const transporter = nodemailer.createTransport({
service: EMAIL_SMTP_SERVICE_NAME,
host: EMAIL_SMTP_HOST,
port: EMAIL_SMTP_PORT,
secure: EMAIL_SMTP_SECURE,
auth: {
user: EMAIL_SMTP_USER,
pass: EMAIL_SMTP_PASS,
},
requireTLS: true, // Force TLS
debug: true, // Enable debugging
logger: true, // Log SMTP communication
});The requireTLS is set to true to force the TLS connection. The debug and logger are set to true to enable debugging and log SMTP communication. If for some reason you encounter an error, you can check the log to see what is happening.