Plantain

A commandline tool for managing the lifecycle of Mandrill templates.

In short, plantain allows the user to manage their Mandril email templates from the commandline, perhaps as part of their configuration management system (eg Salt, Ansible, cfengine, Chef, Puppet, etc).

Install

$ pip install plantain

or:

$ sudo python setup.py install

Notes

Note: Plantain used to be called banana, until it turned out that someone else already had banana in the cheese shop! For backward comparability plantain installs a plantain and for legacy support, a banana binary.

Setup

plantain expects each template to consist of three files: an HTML file (.html) for the HTML fork of the email to be sent, a text file (.txt) for the text fork, and a configfile (.cfg) for the metadata aspects of the template (sending address, Subject: header etc). eg:

account_expired.cfg
account_expired.html
account_expired.txt

A sample configfile might read:

from_name = YourCompany
from_email = robot@yourcompany.com
subject = Account Expiration

The keys in the configfile match the keys used by the Mandrill API: https://mandrillapp.com/api/docs/

Note that for fields which are lists, such as labels, you must put a comma after the first item if there’s only one item in the list for it to be recognised as a list (otherwise the list is the list of characters in the token):

labels = foo,

Usage

$ plantain -h
usage: plantain [-h] -k KEY -t TEMPLATE -a ACTION [-p] [-q] [-v]

Manage and deploy Mandrill templates.

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -k KEY, --key KEY     Mandrill API key.
  -t TEMPLATE, --template TEMPLATE
                        Template to manipulate.
  -a ACTION, --action ACTION
                        Action to perform: ['addinfo', 'update',
                        'publish', 'delete', 'list', 'time_series']
  -p, --publish         Auto-publish (for add and update).
  -q, --quiet           Suppress normal output.
  -v, --verbose         Output results and operations.

Examples

Example call to add a new template to Mandrill called “foo_bar”:

$ plantain -k AbbbcdeDeAdBeeFGaFFPA -t foo_bar -a add

Note that this will not “publish” the template. To do that:

$ plantain -k AbbbcdeDeAdBeeFGaFFPA -t foo_bar -a publish

Or you can publish at the same time you add or update the template:

$ plantain -k AbbbcdeDeAdBeeFGaFFPA -t foo_bar -a update -p