Once again, I am pleasantly surprised at how Laravel takes care of something which every SaaS application needs—something that turns out to be the same for nearly every application: email verification after the user signs up.
Using the Laravel Breeze starter kit, which comes with all the user account boilerplate already created, all I had to do is have the User class implement MustVerifyEmail from use Illuminate\Contracts\Auth\MustVerifyEmail, and that’s it! I added the verified middleware to a couple routes, and I was done.
One nice thing is that I could add the middleware to a route that previously had a redirect, and it will now show the “verify your email” screen if they haven’t verified, and then once they’ve verified, it will continue along the redirect chain.
Testing emails locally
When I installed Laravel Sail for local development, I chose to keep Mailpit in the stack—which was a good idea. Ralph, the author of Mailpit, made an amazing email testing tool. It’s a fake inbox that runs locally and captures all email sent from the application.
Setting up Postmark for production
Setting up and sending a test production email was also trivial. I created an account with Postmark, choosing it because of its good reputation, added an API key to the .env of my application, installed the Postmark driver for Laravel with Composer, and changed one line in the .env to say postmark instead of smtp.
I tried creating an account with my real Dashify email, and sure enough it came through to my real inbox.