Swoosh Sendgrid send email error 400 - How should I approach debugging it?

Phoenix Forum Questions / Help
1

I am trying to send emails using Sendgrid with Swoosh. I tried the HTTP request and sent it with Postman, it works fine. When I try to do it with Swoosh, I get the error code 400 with Nginx - Bad Request.

How should I approach debugging this? I considered going through the library itself to understand what might be different between my request in Postman and Swoosh (since it’s unclear to me how Swoosh builds the HTTP request behind scenes).

defmodule PhoenixApp.PrepareEmail do
  use Phoenix.Swoosh, view: PhoenixAppWeb.EmailView, layout: {PhoenixAppWeb.EmailView, :email_root}

  def create_email(conn, email) do
    new()
    |> to({"someone", email})
    |> from({"...name...", "...email..."})
    |> reply_to({"...name...", "...email..."})
    |> subject("...subject...")
    |> text_body("hey there")
  end
end

defmodule PhoenixApp.Mailer do
  use Swoosh.Mailer, otp_app: :phoenix_app
end

defmodule PhoenixAppWeb.PageController do
  use PhoenixAppWeb, :controller

  def index(conn, _params) do

    # Create Email
    email = PhoenixApp.PrepareEmail.create_email(conn, email)

    # Send Email
    PhoenixApp.Mailer.deliver(email)
  
    render(conn, "index.html")
  end
end
2

This comes from little experience with Swoosh but more of lending you brain power.

Does the email variable match what you’re sending in Postman? I can’t tell if that’s generic text for illustration purposes. I ask because sometimes you have to send what looks like an email address.

You could try tacking on an IO.inspect() call to your deliver method to see if anything returns there but I suspect the error you’re seeing on screen comes from an error being raised. You could try using case… with {:ok, result} and {:error, error} tuples or try to trap the error if it’s from a raise. I thought that’s supposed to only happen with the functions with ! on the end though. You should be able to inspect at the boundary you’re at to get some insight over just a 400 response.

If this were me and that all didn’t work then I’d start unpacking what deliver did with more inspect calls or essentially what you said. I don’t always try to peel back a library’s stack traces unless I think I’ve exhausted what I can at the outer most layers. Bad requests don’t usually come from erroneous data, it usually comes from sending a GET where a POST is necessary. Not all APIs are like that though. Sometimes a missing header or something random triggers it too.