Nodebb: Error spawn sendmail ENOENT

[psychobunny]

Happens when trying to send an email invite when an emailer plugin isn't activated.

Either (or both):

• Prevent selecting this option if emailer isn't activated
• Send proper error back ("Please install an emailer plugin!", etc)

[julianlam]

NodeBB is trying to use the default sendmail handler, but we can't detect whether sendmail itself is installed (... as far as I know...).

Same kind of thing happens when you use mail() in PHP, except it swallows the error, because PHP :smile:

[psychobunny]

Yeah I'm cool with this going to admin user, but this is a potential message shown to end-user

[AmrEldib]

@julianlam I'm getting the same error as an administrator on a hosted instance.
Does hosted instances use sendmail, or do I need to install an email plugin?

[julianlam]

@AmrEldib Can you try again? I've updated the sendmail executable in your instance.

[rfc2822]

Still have this problem ("Spawn sendmail ENOENT") with 1.0.3. It worked until recently. How can I provide further information?

[julianlam]

Ensure that the running user can access the sendmail executable. ENOENT suggests the executable was not found

[rfc2822]

Ensure that the running user can access the sendmail executable. ENOENT suggests the executable was not found

Access was available. After a restart of NodeBB, it now works again… Any hints what I can do when it stops working again?

[rfc2822]

Please reopen, this still happens with NodeBB 1.2.1, see #5181

[rfc2822]

Happens again with NodeBB 1.6.0. No emails sent, logs:

21/9 11:33:28 [1338] - error:  Error: spawn sendmail ENOENT
    at exports._errnoException (util.js:1024:11)
    at Process.ChildProcess._handle.onexit (internal/child_process.js:192:19)
    at onErrorNT (internal/child_process.js:374:16)
    at _combinedTickCallback (internal/process/next_tick.js:138:11)
    at process._tickCallback (internal/process/next_tick.js:180:9)

[pitaj]

So you have sendmail installed? What emailer plugin are you using?

[rfc2822]

So you have sendmail installed? What emailer plugin are you using?

Didn't install a special plugin, because I want sendmail to be used.

I did a ./nodebb upgrade and restarted NodeBB and now it works again, but let's see for how long.

There was also an OS minor update (FreeBSD 11.0 → 11.1) some days ago, but userland shouldn't be affected and all other services etc. didn't need recompiling or something like that. Maybe that's completely unrelated.

[akoSalman]

I had the same issue
First of all you must install sendmail package on your machine
then if you type sudo which sendmail it gives you /usr/sbin/sendmail
It means that if you are not a root user you could not access sendmail and so your nodebb instance.
So you must add the given path to your user's $PATH variable.
You can append export PATH=$PATH:/usr/sbin to the end of ~/.profile file and then close your terminal and reopen another one to reload your environment variables.