Send SMS Messages from Your Rails 5 Application with Twilio

Time to read: 3 minutes

December 19, 2017
Written by
Jonathan Young
Contributor
Opinions expressed by Twilio contributors are their own

coffee-roast-varietals

In the burgeoning world of coffee, there are many varietals of coffee roasts from many regions of the world. Your boss has tasked you to create an application for them to Create, Read, Update, and Destroy (CRUD) different coffee roasts. They have also informed you that they want to be notified via SMS every time a new coffee roast is added to their website in order to prevent their competitors from putting in fake coffee roasts.

Today, we will create a very basic Rails 5 CRUD app entitled “Coffee Roasts” that will notify your boss via SMS whenever a new coffee roast is added to our website using Twilio’s SMS API.

Initializing Our Rails Project

First, let’s ensure that you have Ruby, Bundler, and Rails installed in order to set up a new project:

gpg --keyserver hkp://keys.gnupg.net --recv-keys 409B6B1796C275462A1703113804BB82D39DC0E3
curl -sSL https://get.rvm.io | bash -s stable --ruby
gem install bundler
gem install rails
rails new coffee_roasts
cd coffee_roasts

While I don’t recommend this next step for normal development, there is a Rails generator to create an entire CRUD app with a single command:

rails generate scaffold CoffeeRoast roast_name:string roast_description:text

From there, let’s run through the typical database setup:

bundle install
bundle exec rails db:drop
bundle exec rails db:create
bundle exec rails db:migrate
bundle exec rails db:seed

Integrating Rails with Twilio

Twilio and the Ruby community have created a gem (library) to make integration with Twilio a breeze. Gems are simply thousands of lines of reusable code written by other developers to make your life easier. Gemfile is a Ruby file with a list of the gems required to run your application. Our Gemfile was automatically generated from the scaffold command we ran earlier to create our Rails app.

Let’s add the add the following line to our Gemfile in order to bring in Twilio’s functionality:

gem 'twilio-ruby'

Let’s next run the following command to get the Twilio gem installed in our Rails app:

bundle install

Signing up for Twilio

From there, let’s setup the configuration variables we’ll need for our app.

  1. If you don’t already have a Twilio account, sign up for a free trial. Make sure that the number you pick has SMS capabilities.
  2. After you sign up, Twilio will ask you to verify your personal phone number. With a free trial account, this is the only number you can send texts to, but that’s okay for this app.

Verify a Twilio account
  1. Click the house icon on the top left corner of the Twilio Console. Keep track of your Account SID and Auth Token as we’ll need them later in our Rails setup.

Twilio console overview

Configuring our Application

Now that we’ve got our Account SID, Auth Token, and Twilio phone number, we’re going to add them into our config/secrets.yml file. It will look something like this:

secret_key_base: THERE WILL ALREADY BE SOME CRAZY STRING HERE. LEAVE IT THERE.
twilio_account_sid:  <%= ENV.fetch("TWILIO_ACCOUNT_SID", "YOUR-TWILIO-SID-GOES-HERE") %>
twilio_auth_token:  <%= ENV.fetch("TWILIO_AUTH_TOKEN", "YOUR-TWILIO-AUTH-TOKEN-GOES-HERE") %>
twilio_phone_number:  <%= ENV.fetch("TWILIO_PHONE_NUMBER", "YOUR-TWILIO-TRIAL-PHONE-NUMBER-GOES-HERE") %>

Please note that you’ll need to add your country code in the twilio_phone_number. For example, if your number is “(312) 555-6677”, you’ll enter your phone number as “+13125556677”.

We need to configure our client by adding a Twilio initializer that will be automatically loaded with Rails. Create the file config/initializers/twilio.rb and add this code:

Twilio.configure do |config|
  config.account_sid = Rails.application.secrets.twilio_account_sid
  config.auth_token = Rails.application.secrets.twilio_auth_token
end

Before we start writing the code in our application, let’s test the integration in a console. Use bundle exec rails console to start a console and run the following:

 client = Twilio::REST::Client.new
  client.messages.create({
    from: Rails.application.secrets.twilio_phone_number,
    to: 'YOUR PERSONAL PHONE NUMBER GOES HERE',
    body: 'Hello there! This is a test'
  })

If everything worked, you should receive a text message on the phone number you used to set up your Twilio account. That’s pretty impressive for so little effort!

Let’s Write Some Code!

Next, let’s add the text messaging code to a service object in our Rails application in app/services/twilio_text_messenger.rb:

class TwilioTextMessenger
  attr_reader :message

  def initialize(message)
    @message = message
  end

  def call
    client = Twilio::REST::Client.new
    client.messages.create({
      from: Rails.application.secrets.twilio_phone_number,
      to: 'YOUR PERSONAL PHONE NUMBER GOES HERE',
      body: message
    })
  end
end

Finally, let’s add that service object to our create method in app/controllers/coffee_roasts_controller.rb:

# POST /coffee_roasts
def create
  @coffee_roast = CoffeeRoast.new(coffee_roast_params)

  respond_to do |format|
    if @coffee_roast.save
      message = "The coffee roast '#{@coffee_roast.roast_name}' was just added."
      TwilioTextMessenger.new(message).call
      format.html { redirect_to @coffee_roast, notice: 'Coffee roast was successfully created.' }
      format.json { render :show, status: :created, location: @coffee_roast }
    else
      format.html { render :new }
      format.json { render json: @coffee_roast.errors, status: :unprocessable_entity }
    end
  end
end

Running the Ruby App

And that’s it! To test this, start the server:

bundle exec rails server

Visit localhost:3000/coffee_roasts/new, create a Coffee Roast and you should get a text message!

Ruby SMS Twilio app picture with coffee features

In less time than it takes for most people to search for the best taco in their area, we’ve created an entire Rails CRUD application that is able to send SMS text messages and protect the world from inferior coffee roasts. In the future, perhaps we could provide our ever-vigilant boss some extra features, like the ability to confirm whether or not a coffee roast can be entered into the database through text messages.

If you are a beginner looking to enter the world of coding and have any questions, or if you are just interested in talking further, I can be reached at JonYoungg@gmail.com. Happy Hacking!

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