ex_twilio_bootstrap

Bootstraps a Twilio application and telephone number upon startup to ease development of TwiML applications

Installation

Add ex_twilio_bootstrap to your mix.exs dependencies…

from Hex:

def deps do
  [{:ex_twilio_bootstrap, "~> 0.1.0"}]
end

or, from Github:

def deps do
  [{:ex_twilio_bootstrap, github: "joshuafleck/ex_twilio_bootstrap"}]
end

Include :ex_twilio_bootstrap as an application dependency:

def application do
  [applications: [:ex_twilio_bootstrap]]
end

Configuration

1. Ensure you’ve configured ex_twilio to use your Twilio account credentials.
2. The default configurations may be overridden by setting any of the following in your config/config.exs file:

config :ex_twilio_bootstrap,
  # The public URL of your server (definitely override this)
  public_url: "http://test.org"
  # The friendly name of the Twilio application
  application_friendly_name: "ex_twilio_bootstrap",
  # The friendly name of the Twilio telephone number
  telephone_number_friendly_name: "ex_twilio_bootstrap",
  # The iso (2-char) country code to which your telephone number will be local
  iso_country_code: "GB"

Usage

When you application is started, ex_twilio_bootstrap will log into your Twilio account and check the following:

1. Do you have an programmable voice application named per the configured application_friendly_name?

• If yes, set its /voice and /sms URLs to use the configured public_url respectively
• If no, creates a programmable voice application setting its URLs as described above

1. Do you have a phone number named per the telephone_number_friendly_name?

• If yes, set its voice and messaging URLs to point to those of the application described in the previous step
• If no, purchases a local telephone number in the country of the configured iso_country_code setting its URLs as described above Note: this will charge your Twilio account

Your application may access the application or telephone number settings via the following

# Fetches the application's settings
TwilioBootstrap.Application.get # => %ExTwilio.Application{account_sid: "...
# Fetches the telephone number's settings
TwilioBootstrap.TelephoneNumber.get # => %ExTwilio.IncomingPhoneNumber{account_sid: "...

Making a call or sms to your new telephone number will result in Twilio making a callback request to your application for TwiML on the following URLs:

• Call{public_url}/voice
• SMS{public_url}/sms

Exposing your bootstrapped application to the web

ex_ngrok provides a means for opening up your local Twilio application to the web, including allowing Twilio callbacks to be tunnelled to your local server. You can use ex_twilio_bootstrap with ex_ngrok to immediately begin testing a TwiML application with live calls by doing the following:

1. Add ex_ngrok to your application
2. Add ex_twilio_bootstrap to your application
3. In your application’s config/config.exs file, dynamically set the public_url by fetching it from ex_ngrok:

config :ex_twilio_bootstrap,
  public_url: fn -> Ngrok.public_url end

Your programmable voice application will now be updated to use the url of the Ngrok tunnel created by ex_ngrok every time your application is started.