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Create a Django app to send email with Twilio SendGrid

This tutorial explains how we set up a simple Django app to send an email with the Twilio SendGrid Python SDK and how we deploy our app to Heroku.

Create a Django project

We first create a project folder.

$ mkdir hello-sendgrid
$ cd hello-sendgrid

We assume you have created and activated a virtual environment (See venv for Python 3+) for isolated Python environments.

Run the command below to install Django, Gunicorn (a Python WSGI HTTP server), and Twilio SendGrid Python SDK.

$ pip install django gunicorn sendgrid

It's a good practice for Python dependency management. We'll pin the requirements with a file requirements.txt.

$ pip freeze > requirements.txt

Run the command below to initialize a Django project.

$ django-admin startproject hello_sendgrid

The folder structure should look like this:

hello-sendgrid
├── hello_sendgrid
│   ├── hello_sendgrid
│   │   ├── __init__.py
│   │   ├── settings.py
│   │   ├── urls.py
│   │   └── wsgi.py
│   └── manage.py
└── requirements.txt

Let's create a page to generate and send an email to a user when you hit the page.

We first create a file views.py and put it under the folder hello_sendgrid/hello_sendgrid. Add the minimum needed code below.

import os

from django.http import HttpResponse

from sendgrid import SendGridAPIClient
from sendgrid.helpers.mail import (From, To, PlainTextContent, HtmlContent, Mail)


def index(request):
    sendgrid_client = SendGridAPIClient(
        api_key=os.environ.get('SENDGRID_API_KEY'))
    from_email = From('[email protected]')
    to_email = To('[email protected]')
    subject = 'Sending with Twilio SendGrid is Fun'
    plain_text_content = PlainTextContent(
        'and easy to do anywhere, even with Python'
    )
    html_content = HtmlContent(
        '<strong>and easy to do anywhere, even with Python</strong>'
    )
    message = Mail(from_email, to_email, subject, plain_text_content, html_content)
    response = sendgrid_client.send(message=message)

    return HttpResponse('Email Sent!')

Note: It would be best to change your to email from [email protected] to your own email, so that you can see the email you receive.

Now the folder structure should look like this:

hello-sendgrid
├── hello_sendgrid
│   ├── hello_sendgrid
│   │   ├── __init__.py
│   │   ├── settings.py
│   │   ├── urls.py
│   │   ├── views.py
│   │   └── wsgi.py
│   └── manage.py
└── requirements.txt

Next we open the file urls.py in order to add the view we have just created to the Django URL dispatcher.

from django.conf.urls import url
from django.contrib import admin

from .views import index


urlpatterns = [
    url(r'^admin/', admin.site.urls),
    url(r'^sendgrid/', index, name='sendgrid'),
]

These paths allow the URL /sendgrid/ to send the email.

We also assume that you have set up your development environment with your SENDGRID_API_KEY. If you have not done it yet, please do so. See the section Setup Environment Variables.

Now we should be able to send an email. Let's run our Django development server to test it.

$ cd hello_sengrid
$ python manage.py migrate
$ python manage.py runserver

By default, it starts the development server at http://127.0.0.1:8000/. To test if we can send email or not, go to http://127.0.0.1:8000/sendgrid/. If it works, we should see the page says "Email Sent!".

Note: If you use [email protected] as your from email, it's likely to go to your spam folder. To have the emails show up in your inbox, try using an email address at the domain you registered your Twilio SendGrid account.

Deploy to Heroku

There are different deployment methods we can choose. In this tutorial, we choose to deploy our app using the Heroku CLI. Therefore, let's install it before we go further.

Once you have the Heroku CLI installed, run the command below to log in to your Heroku account if you haven't already.

$ heroku login

Before we start the deployment, let's create a Heroku app by running the command below. This tutorial names the Heroku app hello-sendgrid.

$ heroku create hello-sendgrid

Note: If you see Heroku reply with "Name is already taken", please add a random string to the end of the name.

We also need to do a couple things:

  1. Add '*' or your Heroku app domain to ALLOWED_HOSTS in the file settings.py. It will look like this:
ALLOWED_HOSTS = ['*']
  1. Add Procfile with the code below to declare what commands are run by your application's dynos on the Heroku platform.
web: cd hello_sendgrid && gunicorn hello_sendgrid.wsgi --log-file -

The final folder structure looks like this:

hello-sendgrid
├── hello_sendgrid
│   ├── hello_sendgrid
│   │   ├── __init__.py
│   │   ├── settings.py
│   │   ├── urls.py
│   │   ├── views.py
│   │   └── wsgi.py
│   └── manage.py
├── Procfile
└── requirements.txt

Go to the root folder then initialize a Git repository.

$ git init
$ heroku git:remote -a hello-sendgrid

Note: Change hello-sendgrid to your new Heroku app name you created earlier.

Add your SENDGRID_API_KEY as one of the Heroku environment variables.

$ heroku config:set SENDGRID_API_KEY=<YOUR_SENDGRID_API_KEY>

Since we do not use any static files, we will disable collectstatic for this project.

$ heroku config:set DISABLE_COLLECTSTATIC=1

Commit the code to the repository and deploy it to Heroku using Git.

$ git add .
$ git commit -am "Create simple Hello Email Django app using Twilio SendGrid"
$ git push heroku main

After that, let's verify if our app is working or not by accessing the root domain of your Heroku app. You should see the page says "Email Sent!" and on the Activity Feed page in the Twilio SendGrid dashboard, you should see a new feed with the email you set in the code.