Do not require email server for development environments

[matthew-a-dunlap]

To install Dataverse, an email server is required to complete the installer. Dataverse will run without it (with some log errors) but the installer will not pass.

In the past I've hacked our installer to not ask for the email with good results, tho there may be some slowdown.

It would be good to make this optional for easier use of AWS environments, etc.

[djbrooke]

@matthew-a-dunlap - can you talk about this briefly in sprint planning tomorrow? Thank you!

[pameyer]

For future reference, something like http://nilhcem.com/FakeSMTP/ might be another approach to this.

[mheppler]

This came up today in a live demo. So embarrassing.

[pdurbin]

Please see also:

• issue When setting up a dev environment, I don't want to be blocked by not having a mail server #7236: When setting up a dev environment, I don't want to be blocked by not having a mail server
• pull request improve docs on setting up a new dev environment #7242: improve docs on setting up a new dev environment

[pdurbin]

@matthew-a-dunlap as of PR #7242 the dev guide now gives explicit instructions on how to avoid needing to install a mail server to set up a dev environment:

---

The installer will try to connect to the SMTP server you tell it to use. If you don’t have a mail server handy you can run nc -l 25 in another terminal and choose “localhost” (the default) to get past this check.

---

That's from https://guides.dataverse.org/en/5.11.1/developers/dev-environment.html#run-the-dataverse-software-installer-script

Are you ok with closing this?

[pdurbin]

@matthew-a-dunlap I'm closing this. Using Docker you now get an SMTP server called Mail Dev when you spin up containers. It looks like this:

We switched the main "dev setup" docs over to Docker in this PR:

• switch dev-env docs to Docker #9761

Please give them a try! I'd love to hear what you think. Some related discussion: https://dataverse.zulipchat.com/#narrow/stream/379673-dev/topic/devs.2C.20please.20switch.20to.20Payara.206