Twilio in Rails

This week I was given an assignment by a potential employer. This assignment had a few specs including adding ajax functionality to a rails app so that it would perform as a single page app.

As a bonus, one spec asked me to get Twilio ( a software that sends text messages from your application) working within the app when a new lead was created.

Heres how that went:

Step 1: Sign up for a Twilio Trial account using this link: https://www.twilio.com/try-twilio

Step 2: Set up your account by adding a twilio phone number (the number texts will be sent from)

Step 3: Create a module for sending SMS Texts and add this line of code to your application.rb file

config.autoload_paths += %W(#{config.root}/lib)

so that your file looks something like this

require_relative 'boot'
require 'rails/all'
# Require the gems listed in Gemfile, including any gems
# you've limited to :test, :development, or :production.
Bundler.require(*Rails.groups)
module Pingsurance
class Application < Rails::Application
# Initialize configuration defaults for originally generated Rails version.
config.load_defaults 6.0
# Settings in config/environments/* take precedence over those specified here.
# Application configuration can go into files in config/initializers
# -- all .rb files in that directory are automatically loaded after loading
# the framework and any gems in your application.
config.autoload_paths += %W(#{config.root}/lib)
end
end

Step 4: Add the twilio-ruby , and dotenv-rails gems to your gemfile

Step 5: (Optional but recommended) add an instance method to the model that is responsible for phone numbers that will clean and format the passed in phone numbers.

Step 6: In your texting module, add a method that will be responsible for actually sending the text message, mine looks like this

module Messenger
 def send_sms(number, note)
  account_sid = ENV['TWILIO_SID']
  auth_token = ENV['TWILIO_AUTH_TOKEN']
  @client = Twilio::REST::Client.new account_sid, auth_token
   from = '+14129601023'
   message = @client.messages.create(
   from: from,
  to: '+1'+number,
   body: note
  )
 end
end

This method sets the account_sid and account_secret to the value of environment variables (look into using dotenv-rails and a .env file to set sensitive environment variables).
It then sets an instance variable to @client to the value of a new instance of Twilio::REST::Client and passing in your credentials, saving your twilio phone number to a variable, and then create your message with @client.messages.create.

Your message will require a few pieces of information that you can use a hash to store:

Who the text is coming from, where the text is going, and the content of the text message.

I’m still getting the hang of communicating through blogs so here’s a link to a youtube walkthrough of how to do this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vaobK_V0ue8