Email configuration

Redash uses email as part of user management (password reset and so on) and as a destination for alerts to be received at.

After your first setup, when you log in to Redash, you will see the following notification telling you that your email has not yet been configured, which means that you can't enjoy all the features of Redash:

The email configuration resides inside an env file.

We can use the find or locate Linux command to find where exactly the env file resides on our machine.

By default (in case you used setup.sh based installation), it's located at /opt/redash/env.

In the bitnami installation for example, the file is located at /opt/bitnami/apps/redash/htdocs/env) (in other installations, you can always search for the env file if you're not sure where is it located).

Inside the env file, lots of values have defaults (localhost, for example), so in case you have postfix (or some other email server) running on the same host as Redash, you can leave the configuration settings as is. Otherwise, you will have to alter the following settings (inside the env file):

# Note that not all values are required, as they have default values
 export REDASH_MAIL_SERVER="" # default: localhost
 export REDASH_MAIL_PORT="" # default: 25
 export REDASH_MAIL_USE_TLS="" # default: false
 export REDASH_MAIL_USE_SSL="" # default: false
 export REDASH_MAIL_USERNAME="" # default: None
 export REDASH_MAIL_PASSWORD="" # default: None
 export REDASH_MAIL_DEFAULT_SENDER="" # Email address to send from
 export REDASH_HOST="" # base address of your Redash instance, for example: "https://demo.redash.io"

Once you have updated the configuration, restart all services with docker-compose up -d. If you are using a bitnami image and you want to restart all the services, you will have to use the following code:

sudo /opt/bitnami/ctlscript.sh restart

The output should show you what services were restarted and whether they went up normally.

In the following command output (since we executed a restart), we can see the shutdown of all the services (with the order being preserved), and the startup right after (in reverse order):

Syntax OK
 /opt/bitnami/apache2/scripts/ctl.sh : httpd stopped
 /opt/bitnami/apps/redash/scripts/ctl_redash_gunicorn.sh : gunicorn stopped
 /opt/bitnami/apps/redash/scripts/ctl_redash_celery_worker.sh : redash-celery stopped
 /opt/bitnami/apps/redash/scripts/ctl_redash_celery_scheduled.sh : redash_celery_scheduled stopped
 /opt/bitnami/redis/scripts/ctl.sh : redis stopped
 waiting for server to shut down.... done
 server stopped
 /opt/bitnami/postgresql/scripts/ctl.sh : postgresql stopped
 waiting for server to start.... done
 server started
 /opt/bitnami/postgresql/scripts/ctl.sh : postgresql started at port 5432
 /opt/bitnami/redis/scripts/ctl.sh : redis started at port 6379
 /opt/bitnami/apps/redash/scripts/ctl_redash_gunicorn.sh : gunicorn started
 /opt/bitnami/apps/redash/scripts/ctl_redash_celery_worker.sh : redash_celery_worker started
 /opt/bitnami/apps/redash/scripts/ctl_redash_celery_scheduled.sh : redash_celery_scheduled started
 Syntax OK
 /opt/bitnami/apache2/scripts/ctl.sh : httpd started at port 80

root@ip-10-69-10-45:/home/bitnami#

To test the email configuration setting, you can run the following from your command line (from /opt/redash/):

docker-compose run --rm server manage send_test_mail

For example, for bitnami installation, the command will be as follows:

/opt/bitnami/apps/redash/htdocs# ./bin/run /opt/bitnami/apps/redash/htdocs/manage.py send_test_email

When you run Send Email from the UI, it will look like this (1 – press the send email button, 2 – you should see a notification that the email was sent):

If you didn't get an email after this, the wisest place to look for clues is the logs:

$REDASH_INSTALLATION_PATH/logs/redash_celery_worker.log

Here, we can see a real example of an unauthorized email sending attempt, with incorrect credentials:

[2018-06-24 21:46:09,096][PID:2114][WARNING][MainProcess] celery@ip-10-69-10-45 ready.
 [2018-06-24 21:46:10,690][PID:2147][ERROR][Worker-2] task_name=redash.tasks.send_mail taks_id=adc52790-4e09-4ced-ab6e-375689db3676 Failed sending message: Reset your password
 Traceback (most recent call last):
 File "/opt/bitnami/apps/redash/htdocs/redash/tasks/general.py", line 57, in send_mail
 mail.send(message)
 File "/opt/bitnami/apps/redash/htdocs/venv/lib/python2.7/site-packages/flask_mail.py", line 492, in send
 message.send(connection)
 File "/opt/bitnami/apps/redash/htdocs/venv/lib/python2.7/site-packages/flask_mail.py", line 427, in send
 connection.send(self)
 File "/opt/bitnami/apps/redash/htdocs/venv/lib/python2.7/site-packages/flask_mail.py", line 192, in send
 message.rcpt_options)
 File "/opt/bitnami/python/lib/python2.7/smtplib.py", line 737, in sendmail
 raise SMTPSenderRefused(code, resp, from_addr)
 SMTPSenderRefused: (530, '5.5.1 Authentication Required. Learn more at\n5.5.1 https://support.google.com/mail/?p=WantAuthError m14-v6sbj2132487123dslkj.88 - gsmtp', u'neo.andersson@gmail.com')