How to Use Twilio to Send an SMS

I wrote about liking Twilio’s UI not too long ago. Unfortunately the actual usability of their API isn’t quite as sharp.

Signing up was straightforward enough, but beyond that things got incredibly murky. All I want is to be able to send an SMS from my app; I don’t really care about anything else.

The examples provided for ruby don’t detail this, but fortunately I stumbled around long enough to figure it out.

First, you need to register the phone number you will be sending the SMSes to (this limitation is only for the developer trial period, I believe). Under “My Outgoing CallerID Numbers” section click the “Add Caller ID” button. This will prompt you for a phone number. Enter yours, and it will present you with a PIN and call the number entered. Pick up the call when it rings and enter the PIN when prompted.

Next grab the helper library over here. I did this in Ruby, so just extract the zip and get ‘twiliolib.rb’ from the ‘lib’ folder. For a simple test I wrote the following script:

require 'twiliolib.rb'

# your Twilio authentication credentials
ACCOUNT_SID = 'xxx' # these are on your account page
ACCOUNT_TOKEN = 'xxx'
 
# version of the Twilio REST API to use
API_VERSION = '2010-04-01'

account = Twilio::RestAccount.new(ACCOUNT_SID, ACCOUNT_TOKEN)

d = {
    'From' => '415-599-2671',
    'To' => '480-555-1234', # this is the number you registered
    'Body' => 'This is an SMS Test',
}

resp = account.request("/#{API_VERSION}/Accounts/#{ACCOUNT_SID}/SMS/Messages",
    'POST', d)
    
resp.error! unless resp.kind_of? Net::HTTPSuccess
puts "code: %s\nbody: %s" % [resp.code, resp.body]

The key here is that the ‘From’ number is the Sandbox Phone Number listed on your account dashboard, and the ‘To’ number is the one you registered up above. Any other numbers will not work. Don’t forget to put in your ACCOUNTSID and ACCOUNTTOKEN too, those are also on the dashboard.

Fire up your console and run the script. If you see a bunch of XML and a ‘code: 201’ returned, you should be receiving and SMS shortly. If you see a ‘400 “Bad Request” (Net::HTTPServerException)’ error, then double check that the From and To numbers are right.

This information is buried and I was very close to just throwing my hands up and looking elsewhere. If you are writing an application, these details are critical.

Written by Scott Williams who lives and works in sunny Phoenix, AZ. Twitter is also a place.