This project is intended to jump-start Twilio development projects using Node.js and the Express web framework. In addition to Express, this project contains other third-party modules that may be useful in creating Node.js web applications generally.
This sample application demonstrates how to receive incoming SMS messages and store them in a MongoDB database.
To run this project on your computer, download or clone the source. You will also need to download and install either Node.js or io.js, both of which should also install npm.
You will also need to sign up for a Twilio account if you don't have one already.
Navigate to the project directory in your terminal and run:
npm install
This should install all of our project dependencies from npm into a local
node_modules
folder.
Next, open config.js
at the root of the project and update it with values
from your environment and your Twilio account.
You can either export these values as system environment variables (this is the
default setup), or you can replace these values with hard-coded strings
(be careful you don't commit them to git!).
This sample application stores data in a MongoDB database using Mongoose. You can download and run MongoDB yourself (OS X, Linux, Windows), or you can use a hosted service like compose.io.
On OS X, the maybe the easiest way to get MongoDB running locally is to install via Homebrew.
brew install mongodb
You should then be able to run a local server with:
mongod
By default, there will be a local database running that's not password protected.
To connect to MongoDB, you'll need a connection string
to use with Mongoose. Enter this into your current terminal window, and/or consider
adding it to your .bash_profile
so every new terminal window will have this
setting.
export MONGO_URL=mongodb://localhost/starter_node_express
To launch the application, you can use node .
in the project's root directory.
You might also consider using nodemon for
this. It works just like the node command, but automatically restarts your
application when you change any source code files.
npm install -g nodemon
nodemon .
Basic functional tests (requires local MongoDB) can be run with:
npm test
To test your application locally with a Twilio number, we recommend using ngrok. Use ngrok to expose a local port and get a publicly accessible URL you can use to accept incoming calls or texts to your Twilio numbers.
The following example would expose your local Node application running on port
3000 at http://chunky-danger-monkey.ngrok.io
(note that reserved subdomains
are a paid feature of ngrok):
ngrok http -subdomain=chunky-danger-monkey 3000
In your Twilio number configuration, you would then need to add /calls
as the
Voice URL route, and /messages
as the Messaging URL.
MIT