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Send Email Notifications to Users

CKAN can send email notifications to users, for example when a user has new activities on her dashboard. Once email notifications have been enabled by a site admin, each user of a CKAN site can turn email notifications on or off for herself by logging in and editing her user preferences. To enable email notifications for a CKAN site, a sysadmin must:

  1. Setup a cron job or other scheduled job on a server to call CKAN's send_email_notifications API action at regular intervals (e.g. hourly) and send any pending email notifications to users.

    On most UNIX systems you can setup a cron job by running crontab -e in a shell to edit your crontab file, and adding a line to the file to specify the new job. For more information run man crontab in a shell.

    CKAN API actions can be called via the paster post command, which simulates an HTTP-request. For example, here is a crontab line to send out CKAN email notifications hourly:

    @hourly echo '{}' | /usr/lib/ckan/bin/paster --plugin=ckan post -c /etc/ckan/production.ini /api/action/send_email_notifications > /dev/null

    The @hourly can be replaced with @daily, @weekly or @monthly.

    Warning

    CKAN will not send email notifications for events older than the time period specified by the ckan.email_notifications_since config setting (default: 2 days), so your cron job should run more frequently than this. @hourly and @daily are good choices.

    Note

    Since send_email_notifications is an API action, it can be called from a machine other than the server on which CKAN is running, simply by POSTing an HTTP request to the CKAN API (you must be a sysadmin to call this particular API action). See action-api.

  2. CKAN will not send out any email notifications, nor show the email notifications preference to users, unless the ckan-activity-streams-email-notifications option is set to True, so put this line in the [app:main] section of your CKAN config file:

    ckan.activity_streams_email_notifications = True

  3. Make sure that ckan-site-url is set correctly in the [app:main] section of your CKAN configuration file. This is used to generate links in the bodies of the notification emails. For example:

    ckan.site_url = http://publicdata.eu

  4. Make sure that smtp-mail-from is set correctly in the [app:main] section of your CKAN configuration file. This is the email address that CKAN's email notifications will appear to come from. For example:

    smtp.mail_from = mailman@publicdata.eu

    This is combined with your ckan-site-title to form the From: header of the email that are sent, for example:

    From: PublicData.eu <mailmain@publicdata.eu>

  5. If you do not have an SMTP server running locally on the machine that hosts your CKAN instance, you can change the email-settings to send email via an external SMTP server. For example, these settings in the [app:main] section of your configuration file will send emails using a gmail account (not recommended for production websites!):

    smtp.server = smtp.gmail.com:587
smtp.starttls = True
smtp.user = your_username@gmail.com
smtp.password = your_gmail_password
smtp.mail_from = your_username@gmail.com

  6. For the new configuration to take effect you need to restart the web server. For example if your are using Apache on Ubuntu, run this command in a shell:

    sudo service apache2 restart