gmail-getter

About package

A simple Node.js client that gets messages from Gmail API via http requests & OAuth.

Contributions are very welcome!

Installation

npm install gmail-getter

Requirements

To log into Gmail API you need to obtain credentials: Client ID, Client Secret, Refresh token. These credentails will let you get an Access token, which is required in further requests (like getting list of emails or a single email and etc.).

Steps to go:

1. Create a project in Google Cloud Console.
2. Create OAuth credentials in API & Services section (preferably, select Desktop app there if you need it for automated tests) and then download it.
3. Enable Gmail API.
4. Obtain a Refresh token.

To get a Refresh token - simply execute a command in a project root:

npx gmail-getter get-refresh-token

(or anywhere else if you've got the package installed globally)

get-refresh-token

You must put credentials.json file (p.2) in a place where you execute the command.

Warning

Credentials file name is name-sensitive - rename it to credentials.json if it's named different.

Important

Refresh token expires after some time, especially if you don't use it for a while. Keep that in mind, since you'd need to generate a new one from time to time.

Usage

Import

Import whatever you need from the package:

// ES6+
import {getAccessToken, checkInbox} from 'gmail-getter'

// CommonJS
const {getAccessToken, checkInbox} = require('gmail-getter')

or the whole package:

// ES6+
import gmail from 'gmail-getter'

// CommonJS
const gmail = require('gmail-getter')

Get Access token

You need to get an Access token before you execute other requests:

import {getAccessToken} = 'gmail-getter'

const accessToken = await getAccessToken(
  clientId: 'your-client-id',
  clientSecret: 'your-client-secret', 
  refreshToken: 'your-refresh-token'
)

It'd probably be a good idea to get it on the earlier stages of a test run (global setup?) and store it as an environment variable.

Check inbox

Use a polling function that returns an email:

const email = await checkInbox({
  token: 'your-access-token', 
  query: 'from:your-email-username subject:Your-Email-Subject'
})

Options available:

• token is an access token
• timeout (optional) sets maximum execution time for the function
• step (optional) sets timeout between retries to fetch an email
• all (optional) says whether to find a single email or all mathing the query criteria
• query (optional) lets you filter out emails you want to find, you can find more about queries there

Parse HTML from email

If your email contains html content - you can parse it and even render it in the browser with a browser automation tool (like Playwright):

const html = parseHtmlFromEmail(email)

• email is an email that you fetch with checkInbox function

If you're maintaining an automated test - this might be the best option, as you can verify contents of the email and click any links inside of it.

Complete flow example

And that's how you can get an email you need. It'd probably be good to wrap the logic into a method and then call it from wherever you need (tests?).

import {getAccessToken, checkInbox} from 'gmail-getter'

const accessToken = await getAccessToken(
  'your-client-id', 
  'your-client-secret', 
  'your-refresh-token'
)

const email = await checkInbox({
  token: accessToken,
  query: 'your-query'
})