Inkcite 1.18.3

Environments

Inkcite ships with three distinct environments - development, preview and production. These environments reflect what we believe is the most common email production workflow:

  1. develop the email and artwork locally
  2. send preview versions (optionally minified with image cache-busting enabled, etc.) to yourself, copy editors and/or clients for proofing.
  3. build a production version (optimized, minified, tracked and tagged) ready to be loaded into your ESP and send to your recipients.

Inkcite does not replace an email service like Campaign Monitor and Mail Chimp. Inkcite helps you build the assets necessary to send modern, responsive emails using a separate mail delivery service or tool.

In general, Inkcite chooses the right environment for your current task but you can override using --environment (environment) or the shorthand -e (environment) parameter. For example, to see the production version of your email in your browser, you could run this:

inkcite server -e production

You can easily make environment-specific configuration changes in config.yml. For example, to enable image cache-bust by default but disable it for production builds (recommended) you can modify Inkcite’s config.yml in this way:

# Enable image cache-busting by default.
cache-bust: true

# Override the default configuration for production builds.
production:
  cache-bust: false

Development

In the development environment, your email is served directly from your local workstation. Images are loaded from your project’s local images/ subdirectory. This is the default environment when you start inkcite server and the changes you make inside of your project are immediately visible when you refresh your browser.

# Enable minification of HTML and CSS by default
minify: true

# Disable minification during local development so it's easy
# to inspect the rendered page's souce code if necessary.
development:
  minify: false

Preview

In the preview environment, Inkcite generates an email intended for an internal or private audience of reviewers. Images are uploaded to a web-accessible server of your choosing and in the HTML it generates, Inkcite uses fully-qualified image URLs.

This is the default environment when you run inkcite preview. To learn more, refer to Email Previews.

Production

The production environment is used when Inkcite is preparing your final, ready-to-go assets.

  • Images are uploaded to your CDN and fully-qualified URLs are injected into your HTML.
  • Link tracking and tagging is applied, if desired
  • Your HTML is minified
  • Failsafe checks are executed to save you from costly errors

Inkcite will not produce production-ready files unless all warnings and errors are addressed.

<!-- Add Litmus analytics tracking only in the production mode -->
<% if production? %>
  {litmus id='12345'}
<% end %>