Twilio-Messages

tinkering with twilio services using python

Go to Twilio and create a new account or simply login if you already have an account. Create project by selecting products like Programmable Chat or any other that you want.

Once done you will be redirected to project dashboard and you will get many options for sending messages. You can also click onto DOCS on navbar.

Now let's start requesting using python

Setting Up Environment

Create a .env file in the project folder. Fill the file with your credentials like

TWILIO_NUMBER=<your-number>
TWILIO_SID=<your-account-sid>
TWILIO_TOKEN=<your-account-token>

Then if you don't have dotenv. There are many many other packages for handling environment variables from .env but I would be using dotenv.

Using dotenv is very simple.

1. Install dotenv

   pip install python-dotenv
   

2. Import functions from dotenv

   from dotenv import load_dotenv, find_dotenv
   

3. Call the functions for loading variables from .env file

   load_dotenv(find_dotenv())
   

4. Create .env file with your credentials

   SECRET_KEY=1234567890
   

5. Access env variables using

   import os
   SECRET_KEY = os.getenv("SECRET_KEY")
   

6. Check if values is correct

   print(SECRET_KEY)
   

Now writing some python code.

send_sms.py

import os

from dotenv import load_dotenv, find_dotenv

load_dotenv(find_dotenv())

twilio_number = os.getenv("TWILIO_NUMBER")

message_body = "This is a twilio message."

base_url = "https://api.twilio.com/2010-04-01/Accounts"

message_body can have any string message that you wish.

If you look at the Twilio Docs for sending sms and mms messages. Twilio API requires us to send a few values and there are many more values that are optional.

send_sms.py

...
base_url = "https://api.twilio.com/2010-04-01/Accounts"

auth_cred = (account_sid, account_token)

twilio_url = base_url + '/' + account_sid + '/Messages'

post_data = {
	'From': twilio_number,
	'To': to_number,
	'Body': 'This is a twilio message'
}

res = requests.post(twilio_url, data=post_data, auth=auth_cred)

print(res.status_code)
print(res.text)

Requests python module has very powerful features like the auth and data arguments. Twilio requires Twilio Account SID and Twilio Account Token both so we pass in the tuple of both. Since we are making a post request we need to send some data along with request.

We send a dictionary with key value pairs of data that twilio needs. We send the From keyword, To and Body with the respective data.

If you print the status_code of the request you will get 200 if the credentials and data was correct. On printing the text of the response we get xml data with some information of our message and request.

NOTE: Before sending the message to a phone number you have to verify that phone number in twilio. If you send the message to that phone number with which you registered in twilio then the message will be sent. Twilio won't send messages to a non-verified phone number.

You will get a error message in res.text if error occurs.

Alternatively you can use the twilio python helper library and also use the docs to see how the package works.

Using twilio python library is lot more easier than using requests but we wanted to learn the advanced features of python requests.

Check the twilio_sms.py file for sending sms using twilio library.