How to Create Twitter SMS Notifications Based on Tweets, Retweets, and Mentions

Time to read: 4 minutes

February 13, 2019
Written by
Charles Oduk
Contributor
Opinions expressed by Twilio contributors are their own

twitter-mention-cover-photo.png

Twitter released it’s 2018 Q3 report in October 2018 and it was way better than financial experts had estimated. Twitter’s CEO, Jack Dorsey, in a statement following the report said:

“We’re achieving meaningful progress in our efforts to make Twitter a healthier and valuable everyday service.”

Twitter realized a 29% year-over-year increase in advertising revenue, meaning more businesses are taking to the service to market their products and services. If you have a business on Twitter, you could receive tweets frequently, some within seconds of each other. It is very important that you respond to them promptly in order to satisfy your customers. While it is great that Twitter sends out a notification whenever there’s an event on your account, it would be even better to receive a real-time SMS.

In this tutorial, we are going to learn how to send an SMS when an event occurs.

Tutorial Requirements

For this tutorial, you will need a:

Setup Our Development Environment

Let’s start by creating our project directory. I have named mine Twitter-Twilio.  We need two dependencies for this tutorial, Twilio SDK for PHP, which makes it easy to interact with the Twilio API and TwitterOauth, a PHP library for use with the Twitter OAuth API.

Within the root of your project directory, run the command:

$ composer require twilio/sdk abraham/twitteroauth

That’s all we need to do for now. We’ll come back to this directory later.

Create a Twitter Developer Account

For our use case, we need to use Twitter’s Account Activity API. Specifically, we will use tweet_create_events for the following actions taken to or by the subscribed user:

  • Retweets
  • Replies
  • Mentions

Before we delve into that, you need to create a Twitter Developer Account if you don’t already have one. Your account has to be approved before you can access the API, so make sure to confirm your email at the end of the application. Also, make sure to check your inbox if they request more information about your usage of the API.

Create a Twitter App

On the Apps page of your approved developer account, create an app. I have named mine Twitter-Twilio. On the Permissions tab of your app, enable read, write, and direct messages. Lastly, click on the Keys and tokens tab. You’ll find your app’s consumer key and token. Generate your app’s access token and access token secret. Take note of all the keys and tokens. We’ll use them later in our code.

Get Access to the Account Activity API

We need to get access to the Account Activity API. Navigate to the Dev Environments page, and under “Account Activity API Sandbox” click “Set up dev environment”, name the environment and select the Twitter app. I named my dev environment “development”. Take note of what you name your dev environment, we’ll use it later in our endpoint URLs.

Create an INI File

For this tutorial we are going to save sensitive credentials in an ini  configuration file. In the root of our project directory, create a file called app.ini and add the following credentials:

Twitter]

consumer_key        = "INSERT TWITTER CONSUMER KEY"
consumer_secret     = "INSERT TWITTER CONSUMER SECRET"
access_token        = "INSERT TWITTER ACCESS TOKEN"
access_token_secret = "INSERT TWITTER ACCESS TOKEN SECRET"
screen_name         = "INSERT TWITTER SCREEN NAME"

[Twilio]

twilio_token        = "INSERT TWILIO TOKEN"
twilio_sid          = "INSERT TWILIO SID"
twilio_number       = "INSERT TWILIO NUMBER"

Note: You can find your Twilio credentials from your Twilio project dashboard.

Create the Account Activity Webhook

So far we have created a Twitter app and requested access to the Account Activity API. The next step is to create a webhook that will receive Twitter events. As described in the documentation, our first step is to write code that receives a Twitter Challenge Response Check (CRC) GET request and responds with a JSON response.  

In our project folder, create a file called webhook.php and add the following code:

<?php

$ini_file        = parse_ini_file( 'app.ini' );
$consumer_secret = $ini_file["consumer_secret"];

if ( $_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD'] === 'GET' && ( isset( $_GET['crc_token'] ) ) ) {

   $signature = hash_hmac( 'sha256', $_REQUEST['crc_token'], $consumer_secret, true );
   $response['response_token'] = 'sha256='. base64_encode( $signature );

   echo json_encode( $response );
}

The code above listens for a GET request and is required in order to register our webhook. In order to make this webhook accessible through a public URL, we will use ngrok. From your terminal, run the command:

php -S localhost:3000

On a new terminal window, run the command:

ngrok http 3000

You should have an output similar to this on your terminal:

Great! We have written the logic that registers our webhook and made it available through a public URL. Now we need to write the code that triggers the registration of our webhook. Let’s go ahead and create a new file called register-webhook.php and add the following code:

<?php

require __DIR__ . "/vendor/autoload.php";

use Abraham\TwitterOAuth\TwitterOAuth;

$ini_file = parse_ini_file( 'app.ini' );

$access_token         = $ini_file[ 'access_token' ];
$access_token_secret  = $ini_file[ 'access_token_secret' ];
$consumer_key         = $ini_file[ 'consumer_key' ];
$consumer_secret      = $ini_file[ 'consumer_secret' ];

/* Create a TwitterOauth object */
$twitter_connection   = new TwitterOAuth( $consumer_key, $consumer_secret, $access_token, $access_token_secret );
$webhook_url          = 'https://c8a7320f.ngrok.io/webhook.php';

/* Remove any previous webhooks */
$existing_webhooks    = $twitter_connection->get( 'account_activity/all/development/webhooks' );

foreach ( $existing_webhooks as $webhook ) {
   $twitter_connection->delete( 'account_activity/all/development/webhooks/' . $webhook->id );
}

$content              = $twitter_connection->post( 'account_activity/all/development/webhooks', [ 'url' => $webhook_url ] );

if ( $content->id ) {
   // subscribe user to our app
   $content = $twitter_connection->post( 'account_activity/all/development/subscriptions' );
   echo 'Successfully registered the webhook ' . $webhook_url . ' and subscribed yourself to your Twitter app.';
} else {
   echo $content->errors[0]->message;
}

Note: In the URL account_activity/all/development/, “development” is the name of my dev environment. Make sure to replace it with yours if you chose a different name.

We have used TwitterOAuth to handle authentication and to make a call to the webhook registration URL. Make sure to replace the value of the $webhook_url with the https URL you got from ngrok. Upon a successful webhook registration, we will be subscribed to our Twitter app.

With ngrok and localhost servers still running in other terminal windows, open a new terminal window and run the command:

php register-webhook.php

You should see this in your terminal window:

On your developer account subscriptions page, you should now see this at the bottom:

 

Add Event Logic to the Webhook

So far our webhook.php file only listens for a GET request. When a Twitter event is triggered, we will receive them via a POST request. Let’s add the code that listens for a POST request and handles sending messages for the different events:

<?php

require __DIR__ . "/vendor/autoload.php";
use Twilio\Rest\Client as TwilioClient;

$ini_file        = parse_ini_file('app.ini');
$consumer_secret = $ini_file["consumer_secret"];
$screen_name     = $ini_file["screen_name"];


if($_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD'] === 'GET' && isset($_GET['crc_token'])) {
 $signature = hash_hmac('sha256', $_REQUEST['crc_token'], $consumer_secret, true);
 $response['response_token'] = 'sha256='.base64_encode($signature);
 echo json_encode($response);
}

if ($_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD'] === 'POST') {
 // Retrieve the request's body and parse it as JSON:
 $input = file_get_contents('php://input');
 $event = json_decode($input);

 if ($event->tweet_create_events) {
   $event_details = $event->tweet_create_events[0];
   $event_triggered_by = $event_details->user->screen_name;

   process_event_details($event_details, $event_triggered_by);
 }
}

/**
* Process event details to determine what event was triggered
*
* @param object $event_details      - event object
* @param string $event_triggered_by - name of the person who triggered the event
*
* @return void
*/
function process_event_details($event_details, $event_triggered_by) {

 global $screen_name;

 if ($event_details->in_reply_to_status_id) {
   $reply_text = str_replace("@".$screen_name, "", $event_details->text);
   $message    = "@".$event_triggered_by. " replied to your tweet: '".$reply_text."'";
   send_sms($message);

 } elseif ((strpos($event_details->text, 'RT @'.$screen_name) !== false)) {
   $message = "@".$event_triggered_by. " retweeted : ".$event_details->text;
   send_sms($message);

 } elseif ((strpos($event_details->text, '@'.$screen_name) !== false)) {
   $message = "@".$event_triggered_by. " mentioned you in their tweet: '".$event_details->text."'";
   send_sms($message);
 }
}

/**
* Send an SMS about an event
*
* @param string $message - message corresponding to an event
*
* @return void
*/
function send_sms($message)
{
 global $ini_file;
 $twilio_sid = $ini_file["twilio_sid"];
 $twilio_token = $ini_file["twilio_token"];

 $twilio = new TwilioClient($twilio_sid, $twilio_token);

 $my_twilio_number = $ini_file["twilio_number"];

 $twilio->messages->create(
     // Where to send a text message
     "ENTER A VERIFIED NUMBER",
     array(
         "from" => $my_twilio_number,
         "body" => $message
     )
 );
}

Note: Remember to enter a verified phone number if you are using a trial account, otherwise enter any number you’d like to receive the notifications from.

Test Our Webhook

Now that we have our webhook set up, let’s go ahead and test it. Have a friend mention you in a tweet, retweet one of your tweets and reply to your tweet. You should get messages similar to these:

Conclusion

Congratulations! You have just set up a webhook to listen to Twitter events and send corresponding SMS texts using Twilio. Twitter Account Activity API can be used for a lot more than we have just done. You could work on building a customer service chatbot that not only alerts you about your customers concerns, but also provides a timely response. I look forward to hearing about your projects.

The complete code can be found on Github. You can reach me on:

Email: odukjr@gmail.com
Twitter: @charlieoduk
Github: charlieoduk

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