How to automate AWS SES E-mail Template Update

Amazon Web Service Simple Email Service ( SES ) is a popular and considerably cheap service to send out bulk transactional & personalized promotional emails. However, when it comes to the Template-based emails which help to bind values and send HTML email, the most frustrating part is updating the template and testing them.

Problems:

1. Creating a valid JSON file by escaping the HTML Email Text property

2. Updating the templated HTML file ( manual command-line task )

3. Testing the templated emails

How to automate AWS SES E-mail Template Update

Solution:

I've come up with a normal update script written in Nodejs language with the help of AWS SDK that can help in scaling email template updates faster.

	// install those dependencies first
	var minify = require("html-minifier").minify;
	var fs = require("fs");
	var AWS = require("aws-sdk");
	// usage : node .\template-creater.js .\emailtemplate.html emailtemplate.json false emailtemplate-unique-name "Subject for the email"
	// 1st Argument => Templated HTML File
	// 2nd Argument => Name of the generated template json file
	// 3rd Argument => Update or Create template ( boolean )
	// 4th Argument => Unique template name
	// 5th Argument => Subject of the email
	let isUpdate = process.argv[4];
	AWS.config.update({
	accessKeyId: "XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX",
	secretAccessKey: "YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY",
	region: "us-west-1"
	});
	// read html file from commandline and minify them
	var fileContents = fs.readFileSync(process.argv[2], "utf8");
	// var minifiedHtml = minify(fileContents, {
	// collapseWhitespace: true,
	// minifyCSS: true,
	// minifyJS: true
	// });
	// escape the html code double quotes and special characters
	var myEscapedJSONString = fileContents
	.replace(/\\n/g, "\\n")
	.replace(/\\"/g, "'")
	.replace(/\\&/g, "\\&")
	.replace(/\\r/g, "\\r")
	.replace(/\\t/g, "\\t")
	.replace(/\\b/g, "\\b")
	.replace(/\\f/g, "\\f")
	var params = {
	Template: {
	TemplateName: process.argv[5],
	HtmlPart: myEscapedJSONString,
	SubjectPart: process.argv[6]
	}
	};
	// write to template generation json file
	fs.writeFileSync(process.argv[3], JSON.stringify(params), "utf8");
	//upload to AWS service to render it as template
	if (isUpdate) {
	let templatePromise = new AWS.SES({ apiVersion: "2010-12-01" })
	.updateTemplate(params)
	.promise();
	templatePromise.then(function(data){
	console.log(data)
	}).catch(err => console.log(err))
	} else {
	let templatePromise = new AWS.SES({ apiVersion: "2010-12-01" })
	.createTemplate(params)
	.promise();
	templatePromise.then(function(data){
	console.log(data)
	}).catch(err => console.log(err))
	}

view raw template-creator.js hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Usage:

> node template-creater.js emailtemplate.html emailtemplate.json false emailtemplate-unique-name "Subject for the email"

This will automatically accept the templated HTML file and creates a valid JSON file and tries updating/creating templates in the AWS SES console based on configuration or command-line argument values.

1st Argument => Templated HTML File

2nd Argument => Name of the auto-generated template json file

3rd Argument => Update or Create template ( boolean )

4th Argument => Unique template name

5th Argument => Subject of the email

Final Words:

Feel free to use the script ( No license Restrictions for personal/commercial projects and No Warranty from Author ) and for bugs/hugs do comment below. Share is care.