Create a new design

If you're starting out for the first time and want to create a new design with the name "postmodern", as an example, you'd do the following in your console:

premail new design postmodern

This will create a new subdirectory of designs (or the design directory specified in your premail.yaml file). It will be based on the _default design (or, again, the default design specified in premail.yaml).

Want to create a design based on an existing one? Just add the -d or --design flag:

premail new design postmodern -d premodern

This creates a new design named postmodern with the content of the design premodern.

Working on your design

If you're creating a new design for an email, how do you see what it looks like without creating an email itself? Run premail watch with the -d option without specifying the -e or --email option:

premail watch -d postmodern

This 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.)

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

premail build -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.