Twilio is all about HTTP endpoints & webhooks. From responding to incoming SMS, to controlling the flow of a voice call to blocking unwanted chat messages with an onMessageSend webhook, chances are that you'll end up writing an HTTP endpoint for the Twilio product you're interacting with. Twilio Functions allow you to write and host those endpoints directly in the Twilio cloud while relying on the power of Node.js.

What if you want to develop these functions with your IDE or editor of choice and run them locally? What if something goes wrong and you want to use your debugger to dive deeper into it? For this reason I built twilio-run, a command-line tool that allows you to run your Twilio Functions in your local environment. 

Let's dive into how it works, and how it can help your development flow with Twilio.

> Note

This tool is still in ...

Twilio Programmable Chat provides an SDK and robust back-end for real time chat applications, but it's missing a front-end. If you need a chat UI, as well as a whole bunch of other useful components, then KendoReact might be what you're looking for.

Kendo UI provides well designed and tested components that you can use within your React, Angular, Vue and jQuery applications. In this post we will build a Twilio Chat application with React and the KendoReact conversational UI components.

What you'll need

If you want to build along with this tutorial, then you'll need a few things:

• A Twilio account (you can sign up for a Twilio account for free here)
• A Twilio Chat service and an API key and secret, both of which you can create in the Twilio console (keep these nearby, you'll need them soon)
• Node.js to build our React app and to run ...

User authentication is a crucial requirement for many Angular applications and simply logging in with user ID and password is increasingly inadequate security. Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) provides device-based security that is substantially more difficult to hack, but building your own 2FA system is a daunting challenge. Twilio Authy makes it easy to add 2FA to Angular apps.

This post will show you how to add Authy to your Angular project. You’ll also learn how to improve the user’s experience and your app’s security by using Angular Universal to implement the login process.

In this post we will:

• Create a basic Angular application with a login page
• Set up an authorization guard service and an authorization service
• Add server-side rendering with Angular Universal
• Set up server-side authentication
• Implement two-factor authentication with Twilio Authy

Prerequisites to build with Angular and Authy

To accomplish the tasks in this post you ...

It's 2019 and you need to receive a fax. What do you do? You could buy a fax machine, hook it up to a phone line and hand out your number. But it's 2019 not 1979, we're living in the future, so let's grab Node.js, pick a couple of APIs and turn that fax into an email instead.

You're going to need a Twilio account, a SendGrid account and this noise to remind you what you're missing out on as you build your very own fax-to-email converter.

Receiving a fax

Rather than bulky machinery we're going to use a Twilio number to receive our incoming faxes. You're going to need a Twilio number that supports fax to build this app, so log in to your Twilio account. You can buy a new number or you may already have one, just look for this icon to show that it can ...

Containers are one of the many ways food is shipped to vendors around the globe. The food encounters various types of environmental changes before it reaches the consumer. These environmental changes could impact the quality of the product during the shipment. 

Using Twilio’s Narrowband Developer Kit that was distributed at SIGNAL 2018 we will create a full-stack IoT prototype using the U.S. T-Mobile NB-IoT network. NB-IoT is a new radio network technology that has very minimal power requirements meaning devices can connect with a lifespan of 10 years in the wild. This environmental monitor will be used to track the temperature/humidity of a food shipment and infrequently send small packets of data to update a web application.

Hardware Requirements

• Twilio Developer Kit from T-Mobile Narrowband
• Twilio Narrowband SIM
• LTE Antenna
• Micro USB cable
• Lithium Battery
• Seeed Studio Temperature and Humidity sensor

Software Requirements

• Arduino IDE
• Twilio Breakout ...

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is vital for most web applications. You can build SEO-friendly Angular apps with Angular Universal, but what about the performance and efficiency of such an application? This post will show you how to build fast Angular apps that use client and server resources efficiency while providing server-side rendering (SSR) for SEO purposes.

In this post we will:

• Create an Angular application
• Add server-side rendering with Angular Universal
• Set up an HTTP_INTERCEPTOR with a TransferState service, to prevent duplicate calls to server resources
• Create a route resolver to protect against slow external APIs.

To accomplish the tasks in this post you will need to install Node.js and npm (The Node.js installation will also install npm) as well as Angular CLI. cURL for macOS, Linux, or Windows 10 (included with build 1803 and later) and Git are referred to in the instructions but are not required ...

After I gave a talk at Shakacon this year, I was pleased that people came up to me with additional questions—pleased, that is, until someone asked me for a business card and I realized I didn’t have any with me. Whoops.

In this quick post, I’ll describe how I solved that problem by creating an app that sends business cards over SMS and I’ll show how you can do it too.

Why Build an SMS Business Card

I wanted to create something quickly that would let me share information selectively; not everyone should have my cell phone number. It had to be flexible and extensible. It had to solve the problem with the resources I had on-hand. That meant my laptop, a power adapter, and a Twilio account were my raw materials.

This app really showcases the power of Twilio and what’s possible with our ...

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is important for many Angular single-page applications (SPAs). You can build SEO-friendly Angular websites with Angular Universal, but how do you make your app SEO-friendly in every language your website supports? Google, Yandex, and Baidu, might request your pages in English, Spanish, Russian, or Chinese: how do you make your server-side rendering return the correct language?

The answer is ngx-translate, the internationalization (i18n) and localization library for Angular. This module makes it easy to use translation files that provide the correct language for both client-side and server-side rendering. This post will show you how to use it.

In this post we will:

• Create an Angular application with one component, the home page
• Add server-side rendering for SEO purposes with Angular Universal
• Set up internationalization in four languages with ngx-translate

To accomplish the tasks in this post you will need to install the following:

• Node.js and ...

If you you need to do a quick Twilio test, or compile and run programs on a remote computer without any GUI, or run test programs on your own computer and you don’t want to use a full blown IDE development environment, this is the article for you.

Check Java Installation

Confirm that you have a Java runtime environment (JRE) on your computer for running Java class files:

If you don’t have both, please go to Oracle’s Java SE page and download the Java JDK.

The Java Standard Edition (Java SE) is what you need for developing ...

You know that awkward feeling when you get a nice text from a friend but for some reason, you don't have their number saved? You can't remember and it’s too late for you to respond with, "I'm sorry. Who is this?"

We're going to save you from the embarrassing moment of not knowing who it is by building an app that will let you identify numbers on the go over text.

How We’re Going to Avoid This Problem

Our app will take advantage of three Twilio APIs:

- Functions: the serverless environment which will hold our app

- Lookup: to look up the phone number and see who it belongs to

- SMS: to send us a text with the phone number.

The combination of these three will allow us to send a text with a phone number to our Function which will then perform a Lookup and respond to ...