SendGrid is a email service provider that supports a range of language interfaces to send email. Details at www.sendgrid.com
sgsend is a simple Python utility that allows you to send email from the unix command line via the Send Grid service. Of course this is only useful if you don't already have a mail transport mechanism installed on the machine, which is the case on my Mac as well as on most of the cloud servers that I install. I find it easier to skip setting up postfix etc on my machines and use sendgrid instead.
I use this on my macs and on several different Linux configurations that have Python 2.x installed. YMMV.
This code is licensed under the MIT License (also supplied in this folder) and you should read it to make sure you understand the terms. It's only a few lines long, and says what it says quite clearly, so please do take the time to read and understand it.
sgsend is available on GitHub at https://github.com/vvaidy/sgsend.
You'll also need to install the sendgrid python API, which is also on GitHub but you can also install it using pip or easy_install:
pip install sendgrid
# or
easy_install sendgrid
Before you can send email using sgsend, you will need to generate a SendGrid API key that you'll need in the configuration step below. It's simple enough to generate a key through your SendGrid Dashboard.
sgsend looks for its configuration information in a series of files. The config files are consulted in the following order, with later files overriding values from earlier files, and command line options overriding the config parameters:
- /etc/sgsend.cnf
- ~/.config/sgsend.cnf
- ./sgsend.cnf
A config file should look something like this:
[auth]
API_KEY=YOUR API KEY HERE
[mail]
from=devops@yourcompany.com
subject=Automated Notification from sgsend
You can interactively generate a config file by using the --config command, which will prompt you for the information you need. The only mandatory value is for the API_KEY, you can skip the other values.
$ ./sgsend.py --config
Hit ENTER to skip a particular configuration value.
(required) API Key: THIS_IS_MY_API_KEY_I_GOT_FROM_SENDGRID
(optional) From: vijay@MyEmailForever.com
(optional) Subject:
Destination (enter a for all users, u for this user, d for this directory): u
***************
*** WARNING ***
***************
The file /Users/vijay/.config/sgsend/sgsend.cnf already exists.
Are you sure you want to irretrievably overwrite it? (Y/N): y
Configuration successfully written to '/Users/vijay/.config/sgsend/sgsend.cnf'
$
You can either run the python program directly (with ./sgsend.py) as I showed you above, or just put it someplace in your PATH.
This is what I usually do on a new machine:
sudo cp ./sgsend.py /usr/local/bin/sgsend
sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/sgsend
sgsend --configure
Good Luck!