Wondering how to Create a Laravel Contact Form to Send Emails with SendGrid? We can help you.

Having a contact form on the website makes it easy for the visitors on the web page to contact us directly.

Here at Bobcares, we often get requests from our clients to set up a contact form to send emails as a part of our Server Management services.

In this article, we will see how our Expert Support Engineers create a Laravel contact form to send an email with the help of SendGrid.

Steps to Create a Laravel Contact Form to Send Emails with SendGrid

We know that Laravel is a free, open-source PHP framework, based on Symfony and helps in creating web applications.

It is necessary to have an SMTP server for sending emails through the contact form.

For this, we will use SendGrid which is a cloud-based SMTP provider that allows us to send email without having to maintain email servers.

A SendGrid account and a fully registered domain name pointed to the server are the prerequisites for this setup.

We will see the steps that our Support Techs follow for creating a Laravel contact form to send emails with SendGrid.

Creating the Sender Identity

First, we will have to verify the ownership of the domain name in SendGrid so that it allows us to send emails.

We can follow the below steps to verify the domain.

1. First, go to the SendGrid account

2. And take the Dashboard.

3. Then click on Authenticate your Domain.

4. After this we need to specify our DNS host and choose to brand the links for the domain.

5. Select No for email link branding.

6. Then click Next and on the next page, specify the domain name.

7. Finally, we will add the DNS records provided by SendGrid to complete their verification process.

8. After adding the DNS records to the DNS zone,  we can go back to SendGrid and click the Verify button.

9. Now we will use the Laravel .env file to generate an API key.

10. We will click on API Keys first and then click on the Create API Key button.

11. For security, we will set the API Key Permissions to Restricted Access.

12. After that, we will add the Mail Send permissions.

13. Finally, click on the Create & View button to get the API key.

We will save this API key for further use.

Configuring the SMTP Details

The .env file in Laravel will store various configuration options for our application environment.

Using the following steps we can configure the SMTP details:

1. We will go to the /var/www/travellist directory to access  the .env file with the following command:

$ cd /var/www/travellist

2. After that, open the .env file:

$ nano .env

3. To change the MAIL variables we will alert the MAIL_ settings and configure the variables given below:

. . .
MAIL_MAILER=smtp
MAIL_HOST=smtp.sendgrid.net
MAIL_PORT=587
MAIL_USERNAME=apikey
MAIL_PASSWORD=sendgrid_api_key
MAIL_ENCRYPTION=tls
. . .

4. Save and exit the file.

Creating the Controller

The controller we create will handle our POST and GET requests for the contact form page.

1. We will use the following artisan command in order to create a controller called ContactController in Laravel:

$ php artisan make:controller ContactController

2. Then run the following to edit the ContactController.php file:

$ nano app/Http/Controllers/ContactController.php

3. To include the Laravel Mail facade add the following:

class ContactController extends Controller
{
public function contact(){
return view('contact');
}
}

class ContactController extends Controller
{
public function contact(){
return view('contact');
}

public function contactPost(Request $request){
$this->validate($request, [
'name' => 'required',
'email' => 'required|email',
'comment' => 'required'
]);

Mail::send('email', [
'name' => $request->get('name'),
'email' => $request->get('email'),
'comment' => $request->get('comment') ],
function ($message) {
$message->from('youremail@your_domain');
$message->to('youremail@your_domain', 'Your Name')
->subject('Your Website Contact Form');
});

return back()->with('success', 'Thanks for contacting me, I will get back to you soon!');

}
}

$ nano routes/web.php

name('contact');

name('contact');
Route::post('/contact', 'ContactController@contactPost')->name('contactPost');

$ nano resources/views/contact.blade.php

@if(session('success'))

{{ session('success') }}

@endif


@csrf

Email address

{{ $errors->first('email') }}


Name

{{ $errors->first('name') }}



Comment

{{ $errors->first('comment') }}

Submit

$ nano resources/views/email.blade.php

Inquiry from: {{ $name }}
 Email: {{ $email }} 
 Message: {{ $comment }}