Email & Webhooks

Within BookStack email is used in various ways relating to user management & authentication. Outgoing webhooks are available as a mechanism to extend BookStack or notify in an event-driven manner.

Email Configuration

BookStack sends out emails for a range of purposes such as email-address confirmation & “forgot password” flows. Both SMTP and Sendmail (Linux Sendmail) are supported email mechanisms.

SMTP

To get up and running with SMTP you will need to add, or set, the following variables in your .env file:

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MAIL_DRIVER=smtp

# SMTP server host address
MAIL_HOST=smtp.provider.tld

# SMTP server port
# Using port 465 will force connections to be via TLS
MAIL_PORT=587

# Connection encryption to use
# Valid values are: tls, null
# Using 'tls' will require either TLS or STARTTLS to be used.
# When using 'null' STARTTLS will still be attempted if announced
# as supported by your SMTP server.
# Using port 465 above will force connections to be via TLS.
MAIL_ENCRYPTION=tls

# Authentication details for your SMTP service
MAIL_USERNAME=user@provider.tld
MAIL_PASSWORD=onlyifneeded

# The "from" email address for outgoing email
MAIL_FROM=noreply@yourdomain.tld  

# The "from" name used for outgoing email
MAIL_FROM_NAME=BookStack

Connection TLS/SSL Certificate Verification

In some cases your SMTP server may be using a private/self-signed TLS/SSL certificate that would usually fail certificate verification. In these cases its common for that certificate (Or its CA) to be added to the BookStack’s host trusted certificate database. If that’s not possible, you can alternatively disable SSL/TLS certificate verification for mail sending by adding this setting to your .env file:

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# Verify SSL/TLS certificates during SMTP sending
# WARNING: Disabling verification using a 'false' value 
# can make you vulnerable to MITM attacks
MAIL_VERIFY_SSL=false

Sendmail

The sendmail drivers uses the sendmail application on the host system. By default it will call /usr/sbin/sendmail -bs although this is configurable.

To enable this option you can set the following in your .env file:

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MAIL_DRIVER=sendmail

# The "from" email address for outgoing email
MAIL_FROM=noreply@yourdomain.tld  

# The "from" name used for outgoing email
MAIL_FROM_NAME=BookStack

# The command to use for calling sendmail
MAIL_SENDMAIL_COMMAND="/usr/sbin/sendmail -bs"

Debugging Email

You can follow the instructions provided in the debugging documentation page to help gain more details about issues you may come across. Within the “Settings > Maintenance” area of BookStack you can find a “Send a Test Email” action which provides a quick & easy way to send emails after changing your configuration. This action will also attempt to capture any errors thrown and display them.

Outgoing Webhooks

Webhooks can be configured in the “Settings > Webhooks” area of your BookStack instance. An example of the POST data format is shown when creating or editing a webhook.

The webhook data is “Slack Compatible” in respect to having a text property containing a human-readable description of the event. Services such as Discord, Zulip and Teams, upon many others, have options to support this format.

A video guide on BookStack webhooks, including usage with Discord and HomeAssistant, can be found here.

The running of webhooks can slow down a system due to the required additional processing time. See the async action handling section below to details on running webhooks in a background process to improve performance.

Async Action Handling

Actions like sending email or triggering webhooks are performed synchronously by default which can slow down page loading when those actions are triggered. These actions can instead be processed asynchronously so they’re handled in the background to prevent slowing down the request. This requires a config change and a queue worker process to handle these background jobs:

Config Change

Within your .env file add or update (if already existing) the following option then save the file.

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QUEUE_CONNECTION=database

Queue Worker Process

The queue work process can be run via the following command from your BookStack installation directory:

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php artisan queue:work --sleep=3 --tries=3

Ideally this needs to be ran continuously. The method of doing this may depend on your operating system and personal software preferences. On many modern Linux systems systemd is an appropriate method. The below unit file example can be used with systemd to run this process. Note, this is suited to Ubuntu 20.04 setups that have used our installation script. Details may need tweaking for other systems.

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[Unit]
Description=BookStack Queue Worker

[Service]
User=www-data
Group=www-data
Restart=always
ExecStart=/usr/bin/php /var/www/bookstack/artisan queue:work --sleep=3 --tries=1 --max-time=3600

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

To configure systemd (On a Ubuntu 20.04 system) with the above unit you’d typically:

• Create a new /etc/systemd/system/bookstack-queue.service file containing the above content.
• Run systemctl daemon-reload to discover the new service.
• Run systemctl enable bookstack-queue.service to ensure the service starts at (re)boot.
• Run systemctl start bookstack-queue.service to start the queue service.

Note: you may need to run the above commands with sudo if not acting as a privileged user.

You can then use systemctl status bookstack-queue.service to check the status of the queue worker.