Local email testing

Mailpit is an opt-in development-only SMTP inbox. It is not included in the default self-hosted stack, which bootstraps the first administrator without email verification and leaves email alerts disabled.

Start Firewatch with the local email override:

docker compose -f docker-compose.yml -f docker-compose.mailpit.yml up -d --build

The override enables email verification and starts Mailpit. Omit it when testing the normal self-hosted first-run experience.

Open Firewatch at http://localhost:3000 and Mailpit at http://localhost:8025. Mailpit captures messages sent through its SMTP port; it does not deliver them to the public internet.

The override enables email in both the API and worker and connects them to mailpit:1025 without authentication or TLS. The worker sends incident alerts; the API sends account and invitation mail. Port 1025 is also bound to loopback so a process launched directly on the host can use localhost:1025. It also permits the Vite development origin at http://localhost:5173 for passkey ceremonies while the canonical Docker web origin remains http://localhost:3000.

To stop only the development inbox:

docker compose -f docker-compose.yml -f docker-compose.mailpit.yml stop mailpit

Do not rely on Mailpit in production. Configure the standard Email__* settings against an authenticated, TLS-enabled SMTP service instead.