SMS Bot

This is a minimal one way(for now) chatbot. It sends outgoing SMS to whoever the bot's target_num variable is set to.

Author

Daniel Gisolfi - All current work - dgisolfi

Deployment

The SMS Bot is currently deployed in a Docker Container on my personal VM. To deploy another instance of the Bot you can do the following:

1. Get a Twilio SID and Authentication Token as well as an account phone number(do this by creating a new account)

2. Edit the Dockerfile found in the root of the repository to add environment variables. The Bot requires 4, the following is a working example

   # After The intial From Command
   # SET ALL ENVIORMENT VARIABLES
   ENV account_sid=ACXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
   ENV auth_token=YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY
   ENV account_num=+12316851234
   ENV target_num=+15555555555 
   # Before the final run command

3. Create Image of the edited Dockerfile by running the necessary make command make build

   Note: You can change the name of the bot before running this command in the Bot.py file

4. The Bot can now be run by using the make command make all

Developing

To make changes or even develop the Bot further a development environment can be created. Simply run make dev. When completed change directory to the root of the container and enter the /DEV directory. Once inside all files inside the directory are volume mounted for testing purposes.

Resources

This Bot only has a handful of dependencies(listed in the requirements.txt file) however the most important is Twilio. Below is a very simple example of how to send SMS using the Twilio API in python. This example and many more can be found at Twilio.

# /usr/bin/env python
# Download the twilio-python library from twilio.com/docs/libraries/python
from twilio.rest import Client

# Find these values at https://twilio.com/user/account
account_sid = "ACXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX"
auth_token = "YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY"

client = Client(account_sid, auth_token)

client.api.account.messages.create(
    to="+12316851234",
    from_="+15555555555",
    body="Hello there!")