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Introduction

Pretend is a local emulator for the Resend API. Point your Resend SDK at it and inspect every email your app sends, without delivering anything.

What Pretend does

Pretend runs the Resend REST API on your own machine. Your app keeps using the official Resend SDK; you only change its base URL. Every email it "sends" is captured, stored in SQLite and shown in a dashboard where you can read the HTML, plain text, headers, raw MIME and the event timeline.

Nothing leaves your machine, so you can test sign-up flows, receipts and broadcasts as often as you like.

Quickstart Run the Docker image and capture your first email in two minutes. Docker Compose Keep Pretend running next to the rest of your stack. Connect an SDK Base URLs for Node.js, Python, PHP, Ruby, Go and cURL. Configuration Every environment variable the image reads.

What you get

The API for emails, batch sends, contacts, audiences, segments, broadcasts, templates, domains, API keys, webhooks, suppressions and topics, with Resend's request and response shapes and error messages.
A dashboard at /dashboard with an Email inspector: Preview, Plain Text, HTML, Raw, Headers and Events.
Delivery simulation: emails move through sent and delivered, or bounced and complained for Resend's test addresses, and fire your webhooks.
Attachments from base64 content or a remote path, up to 40 MB per email.
Persistent storage in one Docker volume, with a one-call reset.

note

Pretend is an independent project. It isn't affiliated with Resend.