I am trying to write a gjs app that needs to send emails. The way I have found to do this is using spawn_async_with_pipes() to call mail. The app seems to spawn mail, and I don't get an error, but I don't get any useful output nor do I get the test emails...
I have been at this for a while now and have found little to no useful up to date documentation. I am working with gtk3 and gjs (and glib). I have also tried spawning a shell script that in turn calls mail. This resulted in "could not resolve host" errors and a dead letter queue. So I know that I am spawning my command. I am not concerned about the "could not resolve host command", but by the fact that I can't get it by spawning mail directly.
I am spawning mail like this:
const [res, pid, in_fd, out_fd, err_fd] =
await GLib.spawn_async_with_pipes(null,
['mail',
'-V',
`-s "${msgObj.subBlock}"`,
`-r ${to}`,
`-S smtp=${HOST}`,
'-S smtp-use-starttls',
'-S smtp-auth=login',
`-S smtp-auth-user=${USER}`,
`-S smtp-auth-password=${PASS}`,
FROM
], null, GLib.SpawnFlags.SEARCH_PATH, null);
const in_reader = new Gio.DataOutputStream({
base_stream: new Gio.UnixOutputStream({fd: in_fd})
});
var feedRes = in_reader.put_string(msgObj.msgBlock, null);
const out_reader = new Gio.DataInputStream({
base_stream: new Gio.UnixInputStream({fd: out_fd})
});
const err_reader = new Gio.DataInputStream({
base_stream: new Gio.UnixInputStream({fd: err_fd})
});
var out = out_reader.read_until("", null);
var err = err_reader.read_until("", null);
print(` > out : "${out}"`);
print(` > res : "${res}"`);
print(` > feedRes : "${feedRes}"`);
print(` > err : "${err}"`);
err is 0, and res is just true
I don't know what the output should be, but I'm not getting a recognizable error, and no email is being delivered... How can I get my app to send emails? Is spawning mail not the way to go? Thanks in advance for any pointers you can give me.
There's couple things here I think are confusing you I think I can clear up.
await GLib.spawn_async_with_pipes(
GLib has it's own concept of async functions, that when applicable need to be wrapped in a Promise to work effectively with the await keyword. In this case, GLib.spawn_async_with_pipes() is not asynchronous in the way you're thinking, but that's okay because we're going to use the higher level class Gio.Subprocess.
async function mail(msgObj, to, host, user, pass, cancellable = null) {
try {
let proc = new Gio.Subprocess({
argv: ['mail',
'-V',
// Option switches and values are separate args
'-s', `"${msgObj.subBlock}"`,
'-r', `${to}`,
'-S', `smtp=${host}`,
'-S', 'smtp-use-starttls',
'-S', 'smtp-auth=login',
'-S', `smtp-auth-user=${user}`,
'-S', `smtp-auth-password=${pass}`,
FROM
],
flags: Gio.SubprocessFlags.STDIN_PIPE |
Gio.SubprocessFlags.STDOUT_PIPE |
Gio.SubprocessFlags.STDERR_MERGE
});
// Classes that implement GInitable must be initialized before use, but
// you could use Gio.Subprocess.new(argv, flags) which will call this for you
proc.init(cancellable);
// We're going to wrap a GLib async function in a Promise so we can
// use it like a native JavaScript async function.
//
// You could alternatively return this Promise instead of awaiting it
// here, but that's up to you.
let stdout = await new Promise((resolve, reject) => {
// communicate_utf8() returns a string, communicate() returns a
// a GLib.Bytes and there are "headless" functions available as well
proc.communicate_utf8_async(
// This is your stdin, which can just be a JS string
msgObj.msgBlock,
// we've been passing this around from the function args; you can
// create a Gio.Cancellable and call `cancellable.cancel()` to
// stop the command or any other operation you've passed it to at
// any time, which will throw an "Operation Cancelled" error.
cancellable,
// This is the GAsyncReady callback, which works like any other
// callback, but we need to ensure we catch errors so we can
// propagate them with `reject()` to make the Promise work
// properly
(proc, res) => {
try {
let [ok, stdout, stderr] = proc.communicate_utf8_finish(res);
// Because we used the STDERR_MERGE flag stderr will be
// included in stdout. Obviously you could also call
// `resolve([stdout, stderr])` if you wanted to keep both
// and separate them.
//
// This won't affect whether the proc actually return non-
// zero causing the Promise to reject()
resolve(stdout);
} catch (e) {
reject(e);
}
}
);
});
return stdout;
} catch (e) {
// This could be any number of errors, but probably it will be a GError
// in which case it will have `code` property carrying a GIOErrorEnum
// you could use to programmatically respond to, if desired.
logError(e);
}
}
Gio.Subprocess is a better choice overall, but especially for language bindings that can't pass "out" arguments into functions. Using GLib.spawn_async_with_pipes you would usually pass in NULL to prevent opening any pipes you didn't want, and always ensure you close any pipes you don't. Since we can't do that in GJS, you can end up with dangling file descriptors you can't close.
Gio.Subprocess does a lot of leg work for you and ensures file descriptors are closing, prevents zombie processes, sets up child watches for you and other things you really don't want to worry about. It also has convenience functions for getting IO streams so you don't have to wrap the fd's yourself, among other useful things.
I wrote a longer primer on async programming in GJS that you might find helpful here. You should be able to breeze though it pretty quickly, and it tries to clear up some confusion about the relationship between GLib async, JavaScript async and the GLib main loop vs JS event loop.