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Programmable Messaging Quickstart - Ruby

Ahoy there! All messaging transmitted using Twilio’s messaging channels is treated as Application-to-Person (A2P) messaging and subject to Twilio’s Messaging Policy. For detailed information on policy rules to ensure you remain compliant while using Twilio’s services, please see our Acceptable Use Policy.

With just a few lines of code, your Ruby application can send and receive text messages with Twilio Programmable Messaging.

This Ruby Quickstart will teach you how to do this using our Programmable Messaging REST API, the Twilio Ruby helper library, and Ruby’s Sinatra framework to ease development. If you prefer using Rails, check out this blog post.

In this Quickstart, you will learn how to:

1. Sign up for Twilio and get your first SMS-enabled Twilio phone number
2. Set up your development environment to send and receive messages
3. Send your first SMS
4. Receive inbound text messages
5. Reply to incoming messages with an SMS

Prefer to get started by watching a video? Check out our Ruby SMS Quickstart video on Youtube.

Show me how it's done!

Sign up for Twilio and Get a Twilio Phone Number

If you already have a Twilio account and an SMS-enabled Twilio phone number, you’re all set here! Feel free to jump to the next step.

If you are sending SMS to the U.S. or Canada, before proceeding further please be aware of updated restrictions on the use of Toll-Free numbers for messaging, including TF numbers obtained through Free Trial. Please click here for details.

You can sign up for a free Twilio trial account here.

  • When you sign up, you'll be asked to verify your personal phone number. This helps Twilio verify your identity and also allows you to send test messages to your phone from your Twilio account while in trial mode.
  • Once you verify your number, you'll be asked a series of questions to customize your experience.
  • Once you finish the onboarding flow, you'll arrive at your project dashboard in the Twilio Console. This is where you'll be able to access your Account SID, authentication token, find a Twilio phone number, and more.

If you don't currently own a Twilio phone number with SMS functionality, you'll need to purchase one. After navigating to the Buy a Number page, check the SMS box and click Search.

Buy a twilio phone number.png

You’ll then see a list of available phone numbers and their capabilities. Find a number that suits your fancy and click Buy to add it to your account.

Select an SMS-enabled phone number

I've got an account! What's next?

Install the Twilio CLI

We'll need to use the Twilio CLI (command line interface) for a few tasks, so let's install that next.

The suggested way to install twilio-cli on macOS is to use Homebrew. If you don’t already have it installed, visit the Homebrew site for installation instructions and then return here.

Once you have installed Homebrew, run the following command to install twilio-cli:

brew tap twilio/brew && brew install twilio

The suggested way to install twilio-cli is by using Scoop, a command-line installer for Windows. If you don’t already have it installed, visit the Scoop site for installation instructions and then return here.

Note PowerShell will need to be run as an administrator to avoid common permission issues when installing via Scoop.

  1. Add the twilio-cli Bucket:
    scoop bucket add twilio-scoop https://github.com/twilio/scoop-twilio-cli
  2. Install the app:
    scoop install twilio​

twilio-cli can be installed using the Advanced Package Tool (apt) on most distributions such as Debian, Ubuntu, and Mint.

To do so, run the following commands in your terminal:

wget -qO- https://twilio-cli-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/twilio_pub.asc \
  | sudo apt-key add -
sudo touch /etc/apt/sources.list.d/twilio.list
echo 'deb https://twilio-cli-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/apt/ /' \
  | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/twilio.list
sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y twilio

For other installation methods, see the Twilio CLI Quickstart.

Log in to the Twilio CLI

Run twilio login to get the Twilio CLI connected to your account. Visit the Twilio Console, and under Account Info, you’ll find your unique Account SID and Auth Token to provide to the CLI.

Next, we need to install Ruby and the Twilio Ruby Helper Library.

No problem! Take me through the setup.

Install Ruby and the Twilio Helper Library

If you’ve gone through one of our other Ruby Quickstarts already and have Ruby and the Twilio Ruby helper library installed, you can skip this step and get straight to sending your first text message.

To send your first SMS, you’ll need to have Ruby and the Twilio Ruby helper library installed.

Install Ruby

If you’re using a Mac or Linux machine, you probably already have Ruby installed. You can check this by opening up a terminal and running the following command:

$ ruby --version

You should see something like:

ruby 2.7.2

Windows users can use RubyInstaller to install Ruby.

Twilio’s Ruby SDK is tested against and supports Ruby versions from 2.4 through 3.0. (Got an older version of Ruby? You can use rbenv, RVM or Homebrew to upgrade to the minimum supported version.)

Install the Twilio Ruby Helper Library

The easiest way to install twilio-ruby is from RubyGems.

gem install twilio-ruby

Manual Installation

Or, you can clone the source code for twilio-ruby, and install the library from there.

"Permission Denied"

If the command line gives you a long error message that says Permission Denied in the middle of it, try running the above commands with sudo:

sudo gem install twilio-ruby

All set! Let's send a text message.

Send an outbound SMS with Ruby

Now that we have Ruby and twilio-ruby installed, we can send an outbound text message from the Twilio phone number we just purchased with a single API request. Create and open a new file called send_sms.rb and type or paste in this code sample.

Loading Code Sample...
        
        
        This code creates a new instance of the Message resource and sends an HTTP POST to the Messages resource URI.

        Send SMS using Twilio

        This code creates a new instance of the Message resource and sends an HTTP POST to the Messages resource URI.

        You’ll need to edit this file a little more before your message will send.

        Replace the placeholder credential values

        1. Go to the Twilio Console and find your unique Account SID and Auth Token.
        2. Open send_sms.rb and replace the values for account_sid and auth_token with your Account SID and Auth Token.

        Please note: it's okay to hardcode your credentials when getting started, but you should use environment variables to keep them secret before deploying to production. Check out how to set environment variables for more information.

        Replace the from phone number

        Remember that SMS-enabled phone number you bought just a few minutes ago? Go ahead and replace the existing from number with that one, making sure to use E.164 formatting:

        [+][country code][phone number including area code]

        Replace the to phone number

        Replace the to phone number with your mobile phone number. This can be any phone number that can receive text messages, but it’s a good idea to test with your own phone to see the magic happen! As above, you should use E.164 formatting for this value.Save your changes and run this script from your terminal:

        ruby send_sms.rb

        That's it! In a few moments, you should receive an SMS from your Twilio number on your phone.

        Are your customers in the U.S. or Canada? You can also send them MMS messages by adding just one line of code. Check out this guide to sending MMS to see how it's done.

        If you are on a Twilio trial account, your outgoing SMS messages are limited to phone numbers that you have verified with Twilio. Phone numbers can be verified via your Twilio Console's Verified Caller IDs.

        I got the message! What's next?

        Install Sinatra and set up your development environment

        In order to receive and reply to incoming SMS messages, we'll need to create a very lightweight web application that can accept incoming requests. We'll use Sinatra for this Quickstart, but if you prefer to use Rails, you can find instructions in this blog post.

        First, you need a Gemfile with the following content on it. Create a file named Gemfile and paste the following into it:

        # Gemfile
        source 'https://rubygems.org'

        gem 'sinatra'
        gem 'twilio-ruby'

        Ruby projects use Bundler to manage dependencies, so the command to pull Sinatra and the Twilio SDK into our development environment is bundle install.

        bundle install
        ...
        Use `bundle show [gemname]` to see where a bundled gem is installed.

        Create a simple Sinatra application

        We can test that our development environment is configured correctly by creating a simple Sinatra application. Copy the following code and drop it in a new file called quickstart.rb:

        require 'sinatra'
        
        get '/' do
          "Hello World!"
        end

        We can then try running our new Sinatra application with the command ruby quickstart.rb. You can then open http://localhost:4567 in your browser and you should see a "Hello World!" message.

        I'm set up! Teach me how to receive messages!

        Receive and reply to inbound SMS messages with Sinatra

        When someone sends an SMS to your Twilio phone number, Twilio makes an HTTP request to your server asking for instructions on what to do next. Once you receive the request, you can tell Twilio to reply with an SMS, kick off a phone call, store details about the SMS in your database, or trigger something else entirely - it’s all up to you!

        For this quickstart, we’ll have our Sinatra app reply to incoming SMS messages with a thank you to the sender. Open up quickstart.rb again and update the code to look like this code sample:

        Loading Code Sample...
              
              
              When your phone number receives an incoming message, Twilio will send an HTTP request to your server. This code shows how your server should respond to reply with a text message.

              Reply SMS using Twilio

              When your phone number receives an incoming message, Twilio will send an HTTP request to your server. This code shows how your server should respond to reply with a text message.

              Save the file and restart your app with:

              ruby quickstart.rb
              

              Now Twilio will be able to find your application - but first, we need to tell Twilio where to look. We will use ngrok to do this.

              I'm getting excited now - let's connect our Ruby to Twilio!

              Configure ngrok and your webhook URL

              We'll use ngrok to set up a tunnel from the public internet to your localhost. This will let us use a public URL as the webhook for your application.

              First, download and configure ngrok.

              Next, run this command to have ngrok set up a tunnel to your localhost:

              ngrok http 4567

              This will start an ngrok tunnel. Copy down the Forwarding URL that ends with ngrok.io.

              Then, you need to configure your Twilio phone number to call your webhook URL whenever a new message comes in:

              1. Go to Phone Numbers > Active Numbers in the Twilio Console.
              2. Select the SMS-enabled Twilio number you want to use.
              3. For the A MESSAGE COMES IN webhook, enter the ngrok URL you copied down earlier. Append /sms-quickstart to the end of the URL.

              screenshot of "a message comes in" configuration with ngrok URL

              Test your application with a text

              Now that everything is glued together, it's time to test.

              Send a text message from your mobile phone to your Twilio phone number. You'll see a couple of things happen very quickly:

              1. Your Sinatra dev server will note a new connection
              2. Twilio will forward your response back as an SMS!
              It worked! All done - what's next?

              Where to next?

              Now that you know the basics of sending and receiving SMS text messages with Ruby and Sinatra, you might want to check out these resources.

              We can't wait to see what you build!

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              Need some help?

              We all do sometimes; code is hard. Get help now from our support team, or lean on the wisdom of the crowd by visiting Twilio's Stack Overflow Collective or browsing the Twilio tag on Stack Overflow.

              Loading Code Sample...
                    
                    
                    

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