Twilio makes HTTP requests to your application just like a regular web browser. By including parameters and values in its requests, Twilio sends data to your application that you can act upon before responding. You can configure the URLs and HTTP Methods Twilio uses to make its requests via your account portal or using the REST API.
Creating a Twilio Application within your account will allow you to more-easily configure the URLs you want Twilio to request when someone sends an SMS to one of your phone numbers. Instead of assigning URLs directly to a phone number, you can assign them to an application and then assign that application to the phone number. This will allow you to pass around configuration between phone numbers without having to memorize or copy and paste URLs.
When Twilio receives an SMS for one of your Twilio numbers it makes a synchronous HTTP request to the SMS URL configured for that number, and expects to receive TwiML in response. Twilio sends the following parameters with its request as POST parameters or URL query parameters, depending on which HTTP method you've configured:
| Parameter | Description |
|---|---|
| SmsSid | A 34 character unique identifier for the message. May be used to later retrieve this message from the REST API. |
| AccountSid | The 34 character id of the Account this message is associated with. |
| From | The phone number that sent this message. |
| To | The phone number of the recipient. |
| Body | The text body of the SMS message. Up to 160 characters long. |
Twilio also attempts to look up geographic data based on the 'From' and 'To' phone numbers. Twilio sends the following parameters, if available:
| Parameter | Description |
|---|---|
| FromCity | The city of the sender |
| FromState | The state or province of the sender. |
| FromZip | The postal code of the called sender. |
| FromCountry | The country of the called sender. |
| ToCity | The city of the recipient. |
| ToState | The state or province of the recipient. |
| ToZip | The postal code of the recipient. |
| ToCountry | The country of the recipient. |
All phone numbers in requests from Twilio are in E.164 format if possible. For example, (415) 555-4345 would come through as '+14155554345'. However, there are occasionally cases where Twilio cannot normalize an incoming caller ID to E.164. In these situations Twilio will report the raw caller ID string.
All dates and times in requests from Twilio are GMT in RFC 2822 format. For example, 6:13 PM PDT on August 19th, 2010 would be 'Fri, 20 Aug 2010 01:13:42 +0000'