Work with webhooks

One of the most convenient features of the CLI is the ability to quickly direct Twilio webhooks to a new handler. Both Messaging and Voice are supported.

Update webhook handlers

For example, you can redirect incoming SMS webhooks to the /handle-sms route of your deployed server with:

twilio phone-numbers:update {PHONE_NUMBER_SID|E164} \
  --sms-url http://www.your-server.com/handle-sms

Replace {PHONE_NUMBER_SID|E164} with either the SID of your Twilio number (ex. PNXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX), or the E.164 formatted version of the phone number itself (ex. "+14155552671"). This will set the primary SMS URL for the given Twilio Phone number, and that endpoint will begin handling incoming messages.

Similarly, you can leverage the --voice-url flag to modify your phone number's incoming call handler:

twilio phone-numbers:update {PHONE_NUMBER_SID|E164} \
  --voice-url http://www.your-server.com/handle-call

There are also options for setting the fallback URL and more. Run twilio phone-numbers:update --help for a full list of options.

Proxy your localhost

If you specify a webhook URL that uses the host name localhost or 127.0.0.1, the CLI will automatically create a public proxy for you using ngrok and set your webhook to direct requests to the new proxy URL. For example:

twilio phone-numbers:update {PHONE_NUMBER_SID|E164} \
  --sms-url http://localhost:3000/handle-sms

This is incredibly handy when trying to prototype an application and validate your webhook handler logic without deploying code to a publicly accessible URL.

The Webhook plugin

In addition to these built-in features, Twilio Labs has released a CLI plugin to further help you develop and test your webhooks: the Webhook plugin for the Twilio CLI.

Read this excellent introduction blog post to learn more.