Twilio REST Web Service Interface

The Twilio REST API allows you to query meta-data about your account, phone numbers, calls, text messages, and recordings. You can also do some fancy things like initiate outbound calls and send text messages.

Since the API is based on REST principles, it's very easy to write and test applications. You can use your browser to access URLs, and you can use pretty much any HTTP client in any programming language to interact with the API.

Base URL

All URLs referenced in the documentation have the following base:

https://api.twilio.com/2010-04-01

The Twilio REST API is served over HTTPS. To ensure data privacy, unencrypted HTTP is not supported.

Subresources

Twilio Accounts have the following subresources. Click on a link to read the API documentation for accessing or modifying each resource.

Calls

• Make a Call
• Call a SIP-enabled endpoint
• Retrieve Call Logs
• Modify Live Calls
• Verify a Caller ID
• View Call Transcriptions
• View Call Recordings
• Manage Conferences
• View Conference Participants

Call Queues

• Create a Call Queue
• View Call Queues
• View Queue Members
• Dequeue a Member

SMS

• Send an SMS
• Send an SMS from a Short Code
• Retrieve SMS Logs

Phone Numbers

• Search for Phone Numbers
• Purchase Phone Numbers
• Update Phone Number Properties

Usage

• View Usage Data for an Account
• Set Triggers for Usage Thresholds

Accounts

• Accounts
• Subaccounts

Applications

• Applications
• Connect Apps
• Authorized Connect Apps

Miscellaneous

• Error Notifications
• Sandbox

About REST (REpresentational State Transfer)

We designed the Twilio API in a very RESTful way, so that your consumption of it is simple and straightforward. From Wikipedia:

REST's proponents argue that the Web's scalability and growth are a direct result of a few key design principles:

• Application state and functionality are divided into resources
• Every resource is uniquely addressable using a universal syntax for use in hypermedia links

• All resources share a uniform interface for the transfer of state between client and resource, consisting of

  • A constrained set of well-defined operations
  • A constrained set of content types, optionally supporting code on demand

• A protocol which is:

  • Client-server
  • Stateless
  • Cacheable
  • Layered

REST's client/server separation of concerns simplifies component implementation, reduces the complexity of connector semantics, improves the effectiveness of performance tuning, and increases the scalability of pure server components. Layered system constraints allow intermediaries-proxies, gateways, and firewalls-to be introduced at various points in the communication without changing the interfaces between components, thus allowing them to assist in communication translation or improve performance via large-scale, shared caching.

REST enables intermediate processing by constraining messages to be self-descriptive: interaction is stateless between requests, standard methods and media types are used to indicate semantics and exchange information, and responses explicitly indicate cacheability.

If you're looking for more information about RESTful web services, the O'Reilly RESTful Web Services book is excellent.