Environments

When I run maizzle build [environment], should CSS be inlined? Should my HTML be minified? Do I need to make some data available to the templates?

You might want to use different settings when developing locally versus when building the production-ready emails.

For example, you don't need CSS inlining or code indentation when developing on your computer, but you'll want both enabled for the final, production-ready emails.

Maizzle makes it easy to define as many build scenarios as you need, by using distinct configuration files that enable their own build command.

We call these Environments.

Default Environments

Maizzle comes with two config files, each enabling its own build command:

You probably noticed the link between config.production.js and maizzle build production - the keyword in the config file name enables its own build command.

Config file naming

You may use the maizzle.config.js configuration file naming pattern if you prefer:

CJS config

If you need to use CommonJS with module.exports and require() in your Maizzle config file, you'll need to change the file extension to .cjs:

Data merging

Any new Environment configuration file that you create will be merged on top of the base config.js when you run the build command for that particular Environment.

With the example above, when running the maizzle build production command, config.production.js will be merged on top of the base config.js: if the same key is present in both files, the value from config.production.js will be used.

Environment builds

To build your emails for a specific Environment, pass its name as an argument to the maizzle build command:

maizzle build production

The Starter's config.production.js is configured to output production-ready emails in a build_production folder at the root of the project.

Custom Environments

You may create as many Environments as you need, and name them as you like.

For example, you might create a config file named config.shopify.js that you would use to build only the templates from the emails/shopify folder:

export default {
  build: {
    content: ['emails/shopify/**/*.html'],
    output: {
      path: 'build_shopify'
    }
  }
}

The build command for it would be:

maizzle build shopify

Or, if you're using NPM scripts and didn't set up a script for this Environment:

npm run build -- shopify

Config variables

Maizzle exposes a page object that you can access through expressions in your HTML.

This object contains the computed Template config, which is based on config.[env].js merged with Front Matter variables from the Template currently being processed.

This makes it possible to define variables in config.js:

export default {
  doctype: 'html'
}

... and use them in your markup:

<x-main>
  <p>doctype is: {{ page.doctype }}</p>
</x-main>

Current Environment

The current Environment name is globally available under the page.env variable.

You can output content in your emails based on the Environment that you're building for:

<if condition="page.env === 'production'">
  This will show only when running `maizzle build production`
</if>

Top-level variables

You may define 'local' variables that can be accessed outside of the page object:

export default {
  locals: {
    company: {
      name: 'Spacely Space Sprockets, Inc.'
    }
  }
}

These local variables can be accessed without page:

 Company name is {{ page.company.name }}
 Company name is {{ company.name }}

Top-level await

You may use top-level await in your config.js to fetch data from an API:

const data = await fetch('https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/todos').then(res => res.json())

/** @type {import('@maizzle/framework').Config} */
export default {
  todos: data,
  build: {
    /* ... */
  },
}

Environment attribute values

Sometimes you may need to define different values for attributes based on the Environment you're building for.

While you could use long, verbose ternaries in expressions to do so:

<x-main>
  <a href="{{ page.env === 'production' ? 'https://example.com' : 'https://dev.example.com' }}">Link</a>
</x-main>

... Maizzle also supports Environment-based attributes:

<x-main>
  <a
    href="https://dev.example.com"
    href-production="https://example.com"
  >Link</a>
</x-main>

The value of the href-production attribute will be used for the href attribute when doing npm run build or maizzle build production.

The href-production attribute itself will then be removed from the output.