Create a PHP Contact Form using PHPMailer and SMTP over SSL on ISPConfig.

I was struggling with getting contact form to actually send mail to me. Funny thing about coding, you have to get each step correct or nothing will work.
First, I am new to PHPMailer and this simple concept just didn't get in my brain right away. I was running the command...
composer require phpmailer/phpmailer
in the /root/ folder on my server. Like I said, I'm new to using PHPMailer. I didn't realize that there were folders being created in the "wrong" folder and basically useless to me for the rest of the tutorial I was watching.

SSH to your server.
apt install composer
cd /var/www/example.com/web/
composer require phpmailer/phpmailer
Since I only have a root account on my server I received a warning...
Do not run Composer as root/super user! See https://getcomposer.org/root for details
I read the info in the link and decided to go ahead and continue as root user.
My server is setup with only a root user and password NOT allowed. Only login by SSH key.
If this is a bad practice, please tell me, and suggest the better practice. Thanks

In the video the content creator links to the files he used in the video.
https://gist.github.com/daveh/1164348fe21a6e7363d28c7b94c9eb3f

You literally just create the 3 files as he shows in the video..
One change I had to make from his files though to make it work with SSL on port 465 instead of STARTTLS on port 587.

His example...
$mail->Host = "smtp.example.com";
$mail->SMTPSecure = PHPMailer::ENCRYPTION_STARTTLS;
$mail->Port = 587;

I changed to ...
$mail->Host = 'smtp.example.com';
$mail->SMTPSecure = 'ssl';
$mail->Port = 465;

Also, I learned something else from one of his other videos.
I have a single quote in my password for my SMTP user.
In PHP, single quotes are used to quote the password. Having a single quote IN my password breaks the PHP script.
I learned from him that you can just add a \ in front of the single quote inside of the password to make PHP understand what it is reading.
If you password is 123'456
Just add a \ in front of the '
Like this 123\'456 and it will work.

 

I forgot to mention that you will also have to chown the folder that is created by composer, since it is run as root.
Well, I ran the command as root, so I had to chown the folder.
while you are in the web folder you can
ls -lsa to see who owns the other files and folders in the web folder.
then you'll want to chown the vendor folder like this...
chown -R web1:client1 vendor