Install PHPMailer on CentOS Systems

PHP Tutorials - Herong's Tutorial Examples

∟Configuring and Sending Out Emails

∟Install PHPMailer on CentOS Systems

This section provides a tutorial example on how to install PHPMailer on CentOS systems.

Using the mail() function can only send out emails through the "sendmail" command on the local system.

If you want to send out emails through remote mail servers, you can use the PHPMailer package.

PHPMailer has the following features:

Integrated SMTP support – send without a local mail server
Send emails with multiple To, CC, BCC and Reply-to addresses
Add attachments, including inline
Support for UTF-8 content and 8bit, base64, binary, and quoted-printable encodings
SMTP authentication with LOGIN, PLAIN, CRAM-MD5, and XOAUTH2 mechanisms over SMTPS and SMTP+STARTTLS transports
Validates email addresses automatically
Protects against header injection attacks
Error messages in over 50 languages!
DKIM and S/MIME signing support

Here is what I did to install PHPMailer on my CentOS 8 computer.

1. Make sure you have PHP Composer installed:

herong$ /usr/local/bin/composer --version
  Composer version 2.1.3 2021-06-09 16:31:20

2. Using "composer require" command to install PHPMailer:

herong$ /usr/local/bin/composer require phpmailer/phpmailer
Using version ^6.4 for phpmailer/phpmailer
./composer.json has been created
Running composer update phpmailer/phpmailer
Loading composer repositories with package information
Updating dependencies
Lock file operations: 1 install, 0 updates, 0 removals
  - Locking phpmailer/phpmailer (v6.4.1)
Writing lock file
Installing dependencies from lock file (including require-dev)
Package operations: 1 install, 0 updates, 0 removals
  - Downloading phpmailer/phpmailer (v6.4.1)
  - Installing phpmailer/phpmailer (v6.4.1): Extracting archive

3. Find the PHPMailer class directory:

herong$ /usr/local/bin/composer show phpmailer/phpmailer
  name     : phpmailer/phpmailer
  descrip. : PHPMailer is a full-featured email creation and transfer
             class for PHP
  keywords :
  versions : * v6.4.1
  path     : /home/herong/local/php/vendor/phpmailer/phpmailer
  names    : phpmailer/phpmailer

4. Write a PHP script to test the PHPMailer class:

herong$ vi PHPMail-Test.php

<?php
#  PHPMailer-Test.php
#- Copyright 2019 (c) HerongYang.com. All Rights Reserved.

use PHPMailer\PHPMailer\PHPMailer;
use PHPMailer\PHPMailer\SMTP;
use PHPMailer\PHPMailer\Exception;

$srcDir = "/home/herong/local/php/vendor/phpmailer/phpmailer/src/";
require "$srcDir/PHPMailer.php";
require "$srcDir/SMTP.php";
require "$srcDir/Exception.php";

$mail = new PHPMailer(true);

herong$ php PHPMail-Test.php
?>