Quickly test email sending with... artisan tinker!

Artisan tinker is a wonderful command-line helper to run any simple code. I was often using it to test simple things like if there is any data in Eloquent model or something like that. But today I realised it's much more powerful. So when faced the task of testing if Mailgun is working for one of the clients - here's how it looked.

SSH into the server
Run php artisan tinker
Run Laravel code - Mail::send() with any simple view

This is how it looked in "real life". artisan tinker

So the attempt failed - apparently I had unactivated account. After doing the activation, I ran the command again, and there we go. artisan tinker email