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Building your email

Watch your email​

As you work on your email content, you'll want to see how it renders.

Run premail watch using the -e (or --email) option to build your email using the default design in your settings:

premail watch -e welcome

To specify a design, use the -d (or --design) option:

premail watch -e welcome -d postmodern

You can quickly test out what the same email looks like using a different design:

premail watch -e welcome -d premodern

The premail watch command will watch for any changes in any configuration files, template files, or Sass files, and re-render the dist subdirectory of your design, then open it in your default web browser. (If you'd rather not have it open in your web browser, you can append -s or --noserve.)

Build your email​

If you don't want to continuously watch your files, use premail build. Again, using the "postmodern" example, that would be:

premail build -e welcome -d postmodern

This will render the design, open it in a browser and then stop.

Inspecting the compiled MJML

Because Premail assembles several files together, it can sometimes be helpful to see what the final compiled MJML template is -- before it's passed to MJML to render in email-friendly HTML.

To see this file, append --temp to any watch or build command and the compiled index.mjml file will be included in dist.

Images in your email​

Images can be included locally while you're drafting the email, but MJML doesn't do anything magical in terms of hosting these images -- you'll still have to upload them somewhere and use the full URLs for the hosted images.