How to Schedule SMS’s and Calls on Twilio

Table of Contents

• Install IronWorker
• Create an SMS worker
• Package and upload the worker
• Queue up tasks for the worker
• Queue up tasks to run in the future
• Schedule recurring texts
• Schedule recurring calls
• Conclusion

Note: All of the code in this post is available on Github and I recommend you clone that repository as a starting point rather than copying and pasting from this post. You will need to have an Iron.io account and a Twilio account to run the examples, and this post is meant to quickly take you through the important things without going into setup/configuration, which you can find on this README.

Install IronWorker

Be sure you’ve installed the IronWorker command line (CLI) tool. Documentation for that can be found at, https://dev.iron.io/worker/cli. If you have not installed the dependencies for this script, do so by running:

docker run --rm -v "$PWD":/worker -w /worker iron/ruby:dev bundle install --standalone --clean

Create an SMS worker

Now that the preliminary items are finished, let’s schedule SMS with Twilio through the IronWorker. First, let’s start by creating a simple sms worker. You can write this in any language, but for this post, I’ll be using Ruby. This worker simply sends an SMS via the Twilio API, but you can easily make it do a whole lot more like get data from various places and send a more meaningful message depending on what your application or worker system does. This is sms.rb:

require_relative 'bundle/bundler/setup' require 'twilio-ruby' require 'iron_worker' sid = IronWorker.payload["sid"] token = IronWorker.payload["token"] from = IronWorker.payload["from"] to = IronWorker.payload["to"] body = IronWorker.payload["body"] # set up a client to talk to the Twilio REST API @client = Twilio::REST::Client.new sid, token puts "Sending sms..." r = @client.messages.create(    :from => from,    :to => to,    :body => body ) puts "Twilio response:" p r

You must then fill in your Twilio credentials into your payload file, payload.json:

{   "sid": "YOUR_TWILIO_SID",   "token": "YOUR_TWILIO_TOKEN",   "from": "TWILIO_PHONE_NUMBER",   "to": "NUMBER_TO_SEND_TO",   "body": "Hello from IronWorker!" }

Create a Gemfile, or import:

source 'https://rubygems.org' gem 'json' gem 'twilio-ruby' gem 'iron_worker', '>= 3.0.0'

Package and upload the worker

Ok, now that we have our worker files created, we need to package it and upload it. To do that we run this command:

zip -r twilio.zip . iron worker upload --name twilio --zip twilio.zip iron/ruby ruby sms.rb

That will package and upload the sms worker to IronWorker.

Queue up tasks for the worker

Now that we’ve created our sms worker and uploaded it, we can queue up tasks for it. One task or millions of tasks, it doesn’t matter. We simply call our POST task endpoint, so in Ruby, that looks like this:

iron worker queue --payload-file payload.json -delay 60 twilio