[DEMO] SMS controlled telephony switch

This is a example of how you can build a telephony switch where you can configure who gets incoming calls via SMS

Requirements

• A 46elks account
• 2 virtual numbers from 46elks
  • One that your customers will call
  • One used for controlling the system (could technically be the same as the first one, but that would cause incoming messages from your customers to be parsed as commands)

Setup

Configure server

• Copy config.toml.sample to config.toml
• Edit the config to correspond with your system setup
  • The host value can be left as is
  • The port value needs to be unlocked for incoming traffic in your firewall and be accessable from the internet
  • base_url needs to be set to the URL where this server can be reached on. For example yourdomain.com.
  • The static_dir parameter should be set to a absolute path instead of a relative one

Configure the numbers

The virtual numbers can be configure on the 46elks.com dashboard or directly via the API. See our documentation for more details https://46elks.com/docs/configure-number

Configure voice_start on the main virtual number

Should be set to f"{base_url}:{port}/incoming_calls"

Ex if your base_url is http://yourdomain.com and the port is 8080

voice_start -> http://yourdomain.com:8080/incoming_calls

Configure sms_url on the controll number

Should be set to f"{base_url}:{port}/incoming_sms"

Ex if your base_url is http://yourdomain.com and the port is 8080

sms_url -> http://yourdomain.com:8080/incoming_sms

Installing pip packages

Using a virtual environment

It is a good idea to install python dependencies in a virtualenv. This isolates the packages from the rest of your system packages.

Installing virtualenv with pip

pip3 install virtualenv

Create a virtual environment:

virtualenv env

Enter the virtual environment

source env/bin/activate

Installing required packages:

pip intall -r requirements.txt

Running the server

For production environments the server should be ran using a more stable web server than the built in dev server, for example waitress or gunicorn. But for demo and development purpses the dev server works fine.

The server can be started with:

python3 sms-switch.py

Adding users

Copy users.json.sample to users.json and add the users that are allowed to controll the server

Using the demo

Commands can be sent in text messages to the controll number

Commands

• set [name] - sets [name] as the active user that will receive calls
• who - Replies with the name of the active user
• disable - removes the active user, disabling call forwards