This repo provides the code and setup instructions for an SMS bot that sends users surf updates on their desired locations and conditions.
Sign up for a Twilio account and create an SMS enabled phone number. You can sign up for a free trial here. Some important limitations of the Twilio trial account:
- You can only send and receive texts from your personal number
- You only have $15 worth of SMS messages
After creating your Twilio account and phone number create the following environment variables:
TWILIO_ACCOUNT_SIDTWILIO_AUTH_TOKENTWILIO_PHONE_NUMBER
Create a fresh python virutalenv (with >=python 3.6) and install the requirements.txt file
pip install -r requirements.txtThe current requirements.txt file could probably benefit from a bit of clean up.
Running the user sign up texting requires two processes:
-
Run the flask application via
python surf_bot/app.py. This will create a private service on your machine. To make it public, we usengrok. -
Make sure
ngrokis installed on your machine and then runngrok http 5000. This redirects the Flask application's HTTP requests to a temporary URL. NOTE: this URL will expire after 2 hours. You can pay for a public URL if you would like to run this service for longer.- Navigate to the Twilio phone numbers console and change the
A MESSAGE COMES INWebhook to the outputed URL fromngrok. This blog post has more in depth instructions for this.
- Navigate to the Twilio phone numbers console and change the
The user sign up will populate the "database" for what locations to check and
numbers to send updates to. In order to actually check spots for status updates,
the surf_bot/send_updates.py script should be run in a cron job with desired update
frequency.
*/5 * * * * source /path/to/surf/bot/virutalenv/bin/activate && python /path/to/cloned/repo/surf_bot/send_updates.py
Make sure to activate your surf_bot environment in the cron job.