Inliner can never find CSS file

[kirkbushell]

I've defined my CSS files in my configuration, yet when I do, it always complains about not being able to find css/email.css, for file_get_contents. Which is accurate, no such file exists for that, because it's not using the full public_path, which IS set in my config:

return [
    'css-files' => [
        public_path('css/email.css')
    ]
];

So not sure what's going on here, but as it stands it's straight up not working.

Update: I found that if you're doing this with config, you shouldn't also have a link stylesheet in your html, so I removed that, no error - but also - zero styling/inline styles. Just can't seem to get this library to work as expected.

[kirkbushell]

Coming back to this, this package just doesn't seem to work as advertised. I've tried every which way to get it working on Laravel 8, but unfortunately it never seems to find the files required.

[DannyvdSluijs]

@superbiche In an attempt to cleanup this repository I'm looking at the open issues including yours.
It seems you're running into some issues. Could you provide some reproduction steps? Or at least some constraints to the version (Laravel, this library) you've been using?

[sbaum2s]

I have the same issue. Having followed this guide

https://ralphjsmit.com/laravel-emails-tailwind-css

Maybe it would be easier to create a new laravel project just to showcase this plugin and put it on gibthub. Ultimately it looks like its either a path problem or kind of access denied. Because the file exists where the plugin tries to load it from.

[DannyvdSluijs]

@sbaum2s could you create some reproduction steps? As that might be a very good step towards a solution for this issue.

[sbaum2s]

@DannyvdSluijs i created a new Laravel 8 project and upgraded it to Laravel 9. And then i followed the above mentioned guide. The reason i upgraded to Laravel 9 is, because fedeisas css inliner requires Laravel 9 and the reason i started vith Laravel 8 is, the guide uses webpack and not vite(as is used in fresh Laravel 9 projects)

So here is the github repository:

https://github.com/sbaum2s/laravel_8_inline_tailwind_with_fedeisas_css_inliner

added / changed files:

resources/views/mail/statistics.blade.php -> removed :statistics because undefined variable $subject

app/Mail/StatisticsMail.php
resources/css/mail.css
tailwind.config.js
tailwind-mail.config.js
webpack.min.js
resources/mail/base.blade.php -> moved to resources/views/mail/base.blade.php else view in Base cant find file

app/View/Components/Base.php
app/Providers/AppServiceProvider.php

I run "php artisan serve" and the actual action takes place in routes/web.php. It fails to deliver because /css/mail.css file could not be found.

Other than that to get started, of course do an "composer install" and "npm install", "npm run dev".

[ezzanox]

file_get_contents(/css/mail.css?id=0185a793cd0643ccb887f48b27d726e9): failed to open stream: No such file or directory

I'm having the same problem as above, can you help me?

[mberneis]

Have the same issue - To circumvent I changed my css include to

   <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="{{ public_path() . mix('css/mail.css') }}">

Still a bug but at least this way it does inline

[iraklisg]

Have the same issue - To circumvent I changed my css include to

   <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="{{ public_path() . mix('css/mail.css') }}">

Still a bug but at least this way it does inline

Unfortunately, this didn't work for me

[fedeisas]

URLs are not paths. Please use a valid URL for your CSS files instead of paths.

[iampinha]

I believe we can fix this with:
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="{{ asset(mix('css/mail.css')) }}">

but the inline for me is still not good, inline styles are misplaced and not styling at all...

[darwintnt]

the same mistake in Laravel 8

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="{{ asset('css/mail.css') }}">

"file_get_contents(http://localhost:8000/css/mail.css?id=1f806b33d3844536560b510120c53524): failed to open stream: Address not available"

[madeadi]

I encountered this problem too. I'm running the PHP server using php artisan serve. Then, I create a route. In the route handler, I call Mail facade to send a mailable.

Route::get("/send/cop", function () {
    Mail::to("xxxi@gmail.com")->send(new ConfirmationOfPlacement());
});

However, I received the error:

ErrorException: file_get_contents(http://localhost:8000/build/assets/mail-d4858fd2.css): Failed to open stream: 

The problem is because, the php configuration blocks this function file_get_contents. Here's the issue: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/30631972/file-get-contents-not-working-on-the-server-but-working-fine-on-local-machine.

You can configure the php.ini to allow a call to file_get_contents. However, it's a security risk. Or, when sending the email, you can use batch processing/queue.

For me, I test this plugin using tinker instead of the php server.

php artisan tinker

in tinker: 
> Mail::to("xxx@gmail.com")->send(new ConfirmationOfPlacement());

This works.

Btw, my template file's head is like this:

<head>
    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />    
    @vite('resources/css/mail.css')
...

[kirkbushell]

@fedeisas any further input on the issues above? I'm going to take another crack at it this week, as our current method has to pre-build the templates and then use purely inline styles, which is awful.

[DannyvdSluijs]

If I quickly scan the comments above it seems to revolve around two points:

1. Should you use urls or file paths: Laravel offers certain methods such as public_path() and asset() and some will return a file path and some will return a url. @fedeisas you seem to be knowledgeable on the matter maybe you could give some quick context?

2. Using file_get_contents() to get the contents of an url. @kirkbushell perhaps the easiest way forward is changing these for a fully fledged http call using Guzzle. This would be a more fitted approach to what we are doing. (file_get_contents() is the "easy"-way of getting content even when using file paths. fopen() and fread() using a Resource would be better in that case. As a small heads up I know that Guzzle is a dev-dependency but if we want to use it in production code we should raise it to become a main dependency.