Thursday, February 19, 2009

Configuring git send-email to use Gmail SMTP

Lately, I am using git for tracking my work on upstream sources.

When I decided to actually send one patch to a project's mailing list, I found it natural to attempting it the git's way, which is by using the git send-email command.

Now, it turned out I had to overcome some hurdles to be actually able to send the email from my Fedora 10, using Gmail as the outgoing SMTP server.

First problem, if you previously installed git with yum install git that does not include the send-email command; fix this with yum install git-email.

Then, add the correct configuration variables with the following:

$ git config --global sendemail.smtpserver smtp.gmail.com
$ git config --global sendemail.smtpserverport 587
$ git config --global sendemail.smtpencryption tls
$ git config --global sendemail.smtpuser your_email@gmail.com

Now it's ready: the command git send-email patch-name will ask you for some info about the email sender (you can change the From: field) and recipient, your Gmail password and then it will send the email.

Optionally, it is possible to skip the password prompt by adding it to the configuration with:
$ git config --global sendemail.smtppass your_password

Lastly, I found a packaging bug so that git-email does not pull some perl libraries required for this to work, so I had to manually install perl-Authen-SASL (yum install perl-Authen-SASL).

UPDATE: The packaging bug is now fixed, and the commands were updated to also work Fedora 11.
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11 comments:

  1. jayJuly 7, 2009 at 9:47 PM

    This was handy, thanks - you might want to update commands though, as new version of git 1.6.2.5 (F11) moves all git subcommands to be separate, as in 'git config' rather than 'git-config'

    ReplyDelete
  2. UnknownJuly 7, 2009 at 10:30 PM

    Thanks for the notice!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Erik Andrén ZachrissonNovember 30, 2009 at 5:41 PM

    Works like a charm, thanks a lot!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Vojtech Vitek (V-Teq)December 23, 2009 at 12:14 AM

    Thank you very much, this article really helped me!
    The same packaging bug I have found in my OpenSUSE, by the way.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Francisco AlecrimJanuary 7, 2010 at 3:30 AM

    simple and usefull! thanks!

    ReplyDelete
  6. alvarezpJanuary 31, 2010 at 7:54 AM

    Thanks for the post. It is very handy for quick reference, but particularly for explaining this to somebody else.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Reini UrbanMay 12, 2010 at 11:13 AM

    Same problem and solution for debian/squeeze

    sudo apt-get install git-email

    cpan Authen::SASL

    ReplyDelete
  8. AnonymousJuly 28, 2010 at 2:26 PM

    how do i access this via a proxy ?
    I can reach smtp.gmail.com/587 but only by staying behind a proxy.

    ReplyDelete
  9. AnonymousJune 6, 2011 at 6:36 PM

    You saved me a lot of time!
    Thank you!

    ReplyDelete
  10. UnknownOctober 4, 2011 at 10:26 PM

    My kudos also for this writeup!

    I got the following error on my ubuntu (and expect the same on debian linux):
    Can't locate Net/SMTP/SSL.pm ...

    Fixed with:
    sudo apt-get install libnet-smtp-ssl-perl

    ReplyDelete
  11. SageDecember 12, 2011 at 12:31 PM

    Thanks this helped a lot. :)

    ReplyDelete

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