How to send emails using Jinja2 as a Scrapy extension

Question

Do you know or have an example of how to create and send emails with Jinja2 and Premailer as a Scrapy extension?

If I shouldn't use them with Scrapy, what other HTML templating solution do you recommend to send advanced emails?

Answer 1

You definitely can send emails with Scrapy and jinja2. We do it all the time to be alerted from our scrapers. We use mandrill to send out our emails but you can use any other SMTP providers out there to send out your emails. Also you can extend this code to implement premailer into the template.

import requests
from scrapy import signals
from jinja2 import Environment, PackageLoader

class EmailExt(object):
    """
    Email extension for scrapy
    """

    @classmethod
    def from_crawler(cls, crawler):
        """
        On `spider_closed` signal call `self.spider_closed()`
        """
        ext = cls()
        crawler.signals.connect(ext.spider_closed,
                                signal=signals.spider_closed)
        return ext

    def spider_closed(self, spider, reason):

        #initialize `PackageLoader` with the directory to look for HTML templates
        env = Environment(loader=PackageLoader('templates', 'emails'))

        template = env.get_template("email-template.html")

        # render template with the custom variables in your jinja2 template
        html = template.render(title="Email from scraper", count=10)

        # send the email using the mandrill API
        requests.post('https://api.mailgun.net/v3/yourcompany/messages',
                      auth=('api', 'API-KEY-FOR-MANDRILL'),
                      data={'from': '[email protected]',
                            'to': '[email protected]',
                            'subject': 'Email from scraper',
                            'html': html})