twiliointegration.md

Integrate with Twilio

You can use Twilio to embed voice, VoIP, and messaging into applications. In this lab, we will use a Webhook to reply to SMS messages sent to a Twilio phone number. The Webhook is going to be a Knative service running on GKE.

Twilio Setup

You need to create a Twilio account and get a Twilio phone number. You need to make sure that the Twilio number is SMS enabled.

In Twilio console, click on the phone number and go to Messaging section. There's a Webhook defined for when a message comes in. We will change that to our Knative Service later:

Create Twilio SMS handler

Follow the instructions for your preferred language to create a service to handle SMS messages to our Twilio number:

• Create Twilio SMS Handler - C#

• Create Twilio SMS Handler - Python

Build and push Docker image

Build and push the Docker image (replace {username} with your actual DockerHub):

docker build -t {username}/twilio:v1 .

docker push {username}/twilio:v1

Deploy the Knative service

Take a look at the service.yaml file.

After the container is pushed, deploy the app.

kubectl apply -f service.yaml

Check that the service is created:

kubectl get ksvc twilio

NAME     URL                                    LATESTCREATED   LATESTREADY    READY   REASON
twilio   http://twilio.default.1.2.3.4.xip.io   twilio-v96ms    twilio-v96ms   True

Test the service

Let's first check that our service works as expected:

export TWILIO_URL=$(kubectl get route twilio -o jsonpath="{.status.url}")
echo $TWILIO_URL
http://twilio.default.1.2.3.4.xip.io

curl $TWILIO_URL/sms?Body=Hello+World!
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><Response><Message>The Knative copy cat says: Hello World!</Message></Response>

We can finally test our service by sending an SMS to our Twilio number. We need to setup Twilio Webhook first.

In Twilio console, click on the phone number and go to Messaging section. For Webhook defined for when a message comes in, change it to your Knative service name and XIP.IO domain:

Now, you can send an SMS message to your Twilio number and you should get a reply back from the Knative service!