#100DaysOfWeb in Python Transcripts
Chapter: Day 51: Twilio
Lecture: Write a quick and easy Twilio SMS script
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0:00
Now you will think I'm a bit crazy but this is going to be the world's simplest script. Twilio really makes it easy for us to send
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SMS's with Python, using their API. So let's pop in to a file we'll call it twilio_sms.py. And surprisingly, we have to import Twilio.
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No, I'm kidding, that's not a surprise at all. Let's do from Twilio dot rest because we're using their rest API. Import client.
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That is the only function that we need to import. It's pretty crazy, right? Now remember those two IDs that we collected before
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the SID and your authentication token? This is where you specify that. So we could use an OS variable we could just throw this in there, whatever.
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I'm obviously not going to put that in right now. And let's actually put in auth token as our second object here.
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You'll pop your token in there as well. Now, the really really difficult simple part. We have to set up the client object
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using the client function that we imported at the top. To do that, we call it client and we give it the account SID.
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So I was being sarcastic when I said this was difficult because it's really not difficult. Next, we call on client, and this time
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we're going to say use messages.create. Really simple, right? Now let's just make this human readable.
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We could do this all on one line, but let's just pop down give us our four spaces and the first thing that we need to set is to.
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So who are we sending this to? So remember I said you needed to use a phone number here? This is pretty much it. Now keep in mind, for this to work
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we need to use the phone number that we put in when we created our account. Remember it asked you to verify your phone number?
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Well, that wasn't just to prove you're a person with a two-factor key. This is also to allow you to receive messages.
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So if I wanted to, perhaps, spam Bob right now with a few text messages Twilio wouldn't allow me to do that.
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And that's because Bob has not verified his phone number with this Twilio project. I'll explain that in another video, but for now
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just enter in the phone number that you put in there. I'm obviously not putting my number in right now
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for the sake of this video, but we'll put in my area code. I'll edit this off recording. Now we also need to put a from object in here.
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Now this is the phone number that our application used. So mine was +61, this is the free number that
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Twilio set up, four eight zero zero one five three two five. And you'll do the same for yours. Syntactical error there, forgot to put the comma.
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Remember this is still technically one line. And then we have the body of the text message we're sending. So what do we want to say?
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We want to say, oh I don't know, welcome to the one hundred days of web course using Twilio. That's it, nice and simple, right?
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Then we can close that off, and that is our script. Your job here is to give me two seconds I'll use the magic of the recording tool
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to add my stuff in here without you seeing it and then, we'll run it on the command line. And with my SID, my auth token, and my phone number
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inserted into that, we can simply run Python twilio_sms and we should actually not get anything but a returned empty line.
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And that will mean that our script successfully ran or had no errors. And then, at this exact moment my phone should be going off and it is.
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And I have a text message on my mobile saying sent from your Twilio trial account welcome to the one hundred days of web course using Twilio.
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And that's literally it. We just used the Twilio REST API with Python to send ourselves a text message. Really simple, really effective
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and a lot of stuff we can do with this.