"javascript" posts
By 
While the Twilio Messaging API won't charge you for attempting to send an SMS to a landline number, identifying the line type of a phone number can be useful for other reasons. A lot of businesses won't let users sign up with VoIP numbers, for example.
Let's walk through how to identify a phone number's line type with Twilio Lookup and Node.js.
Setting up
For this post you will need:
- Node.js and npm installed (do this first if you haven't already)
- A free Twilio account
- The Twilio Node library
To install the Twilio npm module, navigate to the directory where you want this code to live and navigate to the directory where you want this code to live and run the following command in your terminal to create a package for this project:
npm init --yes
The --yes argument just runs through all of the prompts that you would otherwise …
Trolls and bad actors sometimes use phone numbers from free online providers to create fake profiles for making spam calls. Twilio's Lookup API helps you identify the carrier behind the phone number to learn which users have real mobile numbers.
Setting up
To lookup a phone number you will need:
- Node.js and npm installed (do this first if you haven't already)
- A free Twilio account
- The Twilio Node library
To install the Twilio npm module, navigate to the directory where you want this code to live and navigate to the directory where you want this code to live and run the following command in your terminal to create a package for this project:
npm init --yes
The --yes argument just runs through all of the prompts that you would otherwise have to fill out or skip. Now that we have a package.json for our app, let’s install the Twilio module …
By 
Sending a single email is great, but one of the big advantages of email is quickly reaching a wider audience. Today I’ll show you three ways to send bulk emails with Node.js and SendGrid. Just for fun, let’s say you’re a JavaScript developer who works at a donut shop. You need a way of letting the customers who have signed up to your email list know when fresh donuts have come straight out of the oven.
Prerequisites
- Node.js and npm installed
- A free SendGrid account - sign up here
- At least two email addresses, to test things out and make sure they’re working. You can sign up for (multiple) free Gmail addresses here. Or you can try the old hack of adding a + to your existing Gmail address. Caveat: we ran into some deliverability issues there.
Setting up your environment
First, create your API key from the …
By 
At GitHub Universe 2019, GitHub announced that Actions have been moved into General Availability. We are very excited about this launch and as part of it have launched the Twilio SMS for GitHub Action. In this blog post we'll look at how you can get started with that and some use cases for it.
Getting Started
You can find the Twilio SMS Action in the GitHub Marketplace. Before using it, you'll need a Twilio account. Sign up for free to get your account details.
Once you have an account, we'll need two additional things.
Get a phone number
If you haven't gotten a phone number yet, head over to the Phone Numbers section of the Twilio Console and select your preferred phone number. Make sure it has SMS capabilities enabled.
Once you have that phone number, make sure to note it down somewhere. We'll need it later when …
Earlier this year I built an affirmations button with Twilio Internet of Things. When I’m feeling insecure or anxious (which is often), the button lets me ground myself with a physical gesture and receive a reassuring text message in return.
The box holding the button looks cool but it's not as portable as I’d like, since it contains a Raspberry Pi. As a Twilio Developer Evangelist, I’m on the road writing code fairly often. I needed something that takes up less space in my luggage.
Today I’ll show you how to build a more portable affirmations button with Flic.
What is a Flic button?
Flic buttons are hardware buttons that are small enough to fit in a pocket. Out of the box, they can be configured to do various things when pushed, such as:
- control Philips Hue lights
- start a Pomodoro timer
- make a phone call
You can …
By 
How to secure Twilio webhook URLs in Node.js
Twilio’s APIs allow developers to reinvent communications with things like programmable phone calls, SMS or intelligent chatbots. Developers can build applications to interact with their users and react to their responses. To respond to events like incoming messages, you can define a webhook URL. A webhook is an HTTP request that Twilio performs to find out what the reaction to a Twilio even like an incoming SMS should be. Your defined HTTP endpoints have to respond with a Twilio-understandable configuration language called TwiML (Twilio Markup Language).
These endpoints can be hosted anywhere as long as they’re available publicly and accessible by Twilio’s infrastructure.
Three ways to secure your webhook URLs
Let’s assume you built a rating application that allows users to rate an event they’re at by sending an SMS to a certain number. Every incoming SMS to your number …
By 
Software developers are moving away from the expensive, traditional, server-based architecture platforms and shifting towards the trendy serverless applications. This new way of developing applications is event-driven, cheaper in comparison to the operating costs of maintaining a server, offers a quick way of deploying functions and allows businesses to pay for only what they use.
In this tutorial, you will learn how to send emails using Twilio Functions and SendGrid.
Project Setup
To complete this tutorial you will need the following:
Getting Started
After creating a free account on Twilio, install the Twilio CLI which enables you to develop and deploy functions locally. To install the tool, run the following command in your console window.
$ brew tap twilio/brew && brew install twilio
NOTE: This command is specific to Mac users. If you are on a different platform, …
Twilio use TwiML to programmatically define the actions that take place during a phone call. But this doesn't have to be a rigid script that every call follows. You can also use the Twilio REST API to update these phone calls in real time.
For example, given a Call SID, a unique identifier to a phone call resource, you can redirect which TwiML the phone call is using with the following code:
const client = require('twilio')(); client.calls('CAXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX') .update({method: 'POST', url: 'http://demo.twilio.com/docs/voice.xml'})
Let's walk through how to set up a Twilio phone number to receive phone calls, and test this out for yourself.
Development Environment Setup
Start by making sure you have the right software installed and set up that you'll need to use for the rest of this post. Throughout this post, you will need: …
Function As A Service is a solution that allows developers to develop, deploy, and run event-driven functions in the cloud that are fully managed. Without the need for maintaining infrastructure, "serverless" architecture is achieved. In this tutorial, you will learn how to send Twilio Programmable SMS using the new Twilio CLI.
Project Setup
You will need the following items in order to get started:
Getting Started
First, install the Twilio CLI. I'm currently using version 1.8.1. Run the following command in your preferred terminal if on a Mac:
$ brew tap twilio/brew && brew install twilio
If you are on a different platform, you can find the setup instructions here.
To confirm a successful installation of the CLI has occurred, type twilio in a new terminal session and the output below should appear.
Login to your Twilio account by …
By 
Reactive Extensions (ReactiveX) are one of the most widely-adopted set of tools in programming today. ReactiveX libraries for JavaScript and other languages provide a way to operate on sequences of data as if they were events. This is a convenient way to handle data from asynchronous sources like web APIs: your programs can react to data as it is emitted from the source without tightly coupling the code that uses the data with the code that gets the data.
In this post you’ll learn about the fundamental concepts of ReactiveX programming and get hands-on experience doing ReactiveX programming with RxJS for JavaScript. You’ll learn how to retrieve data asynchronously, manipulate it as it arrives, and handle errors. You’ll also see how RxJS Observables compare to JavaScript Promises.
Introducing the ReactiveX API and the RxJS library
Reactive Extensions, known as ReactiveX, is an application programming interface (API) enabling programming languages …