Sendgrid Sendgrid

This guide will take you through integrating deepstreamHub with Sendgrid's Email API. If you'd like to dive right into the code you can have a look at the GitHub repository for this tutorial here.

There are many use cases for sending emails in applications, from reminders to promotional emails and more. We'll be showing how to create a simple email-provider, that sends a password reset email for your users when requested. We'll be using the deepstreamHub JavaScript client SDK and the Sendgrid SDK for NodeJs.

Create a free account and get your API key

Get started with Sendgrid

The first thing you'll need to do after creating your deepstreamHub account is create a free account over at Sendgrid. You'll be taken through a quick guide where you can generate an API key. From here, sending an email is as simple as:

cconst sendgrid = require('sendgrid')
const helper = require('sendgrid').mail

const client = sendgrid('<Your Sendgrid API key>')
const from_email = new helper.Email('deepstreamhub@example.com')
const to_email = new helper.Email('<Your email address>')
const subject = 'deepstreamHub & Sendgrid together!'
const content = new helper.Content('text/plain', 'Hello!')
const mail = new helper.Mail(from_email, subject, to_email, content)

const request = client.emptyRequest({
  method: 'POST',
  path: '/v3/mail/send',
  body: mail.toJSON(),
})

client.API(request, (error, response) => {
  // response.statusCode === 202
})

Integrating it with deepstreamHub

Let's next create our email-provider, all we need to do is provide an RPC method called password-reset and whenever it is invoked, send an email prompting the user to reset their password.

We haven't enabled any additional authentication settings so we can just login with open auth, however if you'd like to take a closer look into this, hop on over to our email and webhook authentication tutorials.

const client = deepstream('<Your app URL>')
client.login()

client.rpc.provide('reset-password', (data, response) => {
  // send our reset password here
})

Let's also quickly write the client side code that invokes the password-reset RPC. All we need is a simple form where users can enter their email.

With the following JavaScript, we get the data that has been put into the field and invoke the password-reset RPC via client.rpc.make.

const client = deepstream('<Your app URL>')
client.login()

function resetPassword() {
  const email = document.getElementById('name').email
  client.rpc.make('password-reset', email, (error, result) => {
    let msg
    if (error) {
      msg = `An error occurred while sending the password reset email:${error}`
    } else {
      msg = `Password reset email sent successfully, please check your inbox`
    }
    alert(msg)
  })
  return false
}

Now we can see that we're passing the email into our RPC, we can finish off the code in our email-provider process. When sending a password reset email, normal flow is to include a URL that the end user can click, redirecting them to a page where they can enter their new password. We won't be covering that here, we'll just send an email with a mock URL and a unique ID appended to it as our token.

Our email-provider now looks as follows:

const sendgrid = require('sendgrid')
const deepstream = require('deepstream.io-client-js')
const uuid

const sg = sendgrid('<Your Sendgrid API key')
const helper = require('sendgrid').mail
const client = deepstream('<Your App URL>')
client.login()

const from_email = new helper.Email('info@yourCompany.com')
const subject = 'You\'ve requested a password reset'

client.rpc.provide('password-reset', (email, response) => {
  // this would need to be saved to a db for reference later
  const id = uuid()
  const content = new helper.Content('text/plain', `Hello, ${email}!

It looks like you may have requested a password reset.

Please click the following link to reset your password:

https://www.yourSite.com/password-reset/${id}

Thanks, the team at ${yourCompany}`)

  const to_email = new helper.Email(email)
  const mail = new helper.Mail(from_email, subject, to_email, content)
  const request = sg.emptyRequest({
    method: 'POST',
    path: '/v3/mail/send',
    body: mail.toJSON(),
  })

  sg.API(request, (error, response) => {
    if (error) {
      response.error(error)
    } else {
      response.send(null)
    }
  })
})

And just like that, you have a simple way of sending emails using RPCs in deepstreamHub. Thanks for sticking with me. Be sure to check out the other guides and integrations we have, or check out building something more substantial with deepstreamHub via an example app.