Book Image

Twilio Best Practices

Book Image

Twilio Best Practices

Overview of this book

Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Twilio Best Practices
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Node.js


The twilio-node library is available on npm, which is Node's package manager that is included when you download Node itself.

To install the library, run npm install twilio --save in your project directory, or npm install –g twilio to install it globally across your machine.

In your code, you'll just need to require the library and instantiate a client (client.js):

var account_sid = process.env.TWILIO_ACCOUNT_SID;
var auth_token = process.env.TWILIO_AUTH_TOKEN;
var client = require('twilio')(account_sid, auth_token);

The syntax for sending an SMS from this point onwards is similar to Ruby, using a dictionary of arguments.

However, there is a complication in that Node uses asynchronous requests when contacting the API, meaning that we can't simply save what the method returns to a variable. Instead, we provide a callback that will be invoked with the Message object once it has been sent successfully (send_sms.js):

client.messages.create({
  body: "This is an SMS message.",
  to: "+441708300116...