Because a programmer's company should have a programmable phone number
This is an Express JS server to be hosted privately; It manages an IVR system for my business phone, and it's a great base for anyone who wants to create their own IVR!
Twilio offers Service hosting and Twilio Flow's, which achieve a similar result, so why bother self-hosting this? It essentially boils down to two things.
- Developer Experience Self hosting enables me to create a CI/CD pipeline via this webhook to automate deployment of the server from GitHub. Twilio currently does not support deployment of their services via GitHub, and I do not want to manage a new stack for this pipeline.
- Freedom Self hosting an Express server to manage this IVR gives freedom to easily integrate other libraries and API's into the system. Twilio's serverless setup reduces the functionality of the IVR.
Setting up the development environment for this project can be a bit involved, but once set up provides a smooth development experience.
Requirements
- Twilio Account
- 2 Twilio Phone Numbers
- ngrok Account
- 3 Terminal windows
Setup Twilio Dev Phone on your local PC. Utilize a spare phone number that doesn't serve your IVR.
Start Dev Phone
twilio dev-phone
In a new terminal, initialize your Twilio project, cd into it and run the project
npm run start
Now that Twilio is being served locally, log into ngrok and open the setup screen. In a third terminal run the startup command for ngrok.
ngrok http http://localhost:3000
This will output the URL your local function is being served on. Copy this.
Go to your Twilio console and select:
Develop > Phone Numbers > Manage > Active numbers
or search for Active numbers in the search bar.
Select your IVR number and edit the dropdown A call comes in to say Webhook. Paste in the ngrok URL with the addition of your entry path (in this case /voice). Save the configuration. Now when that number is called from your dev phone (or any other phone) it will be handled by the webhook running locally at localhost:3000/voice.
Be sure to reset the console settings after to your URL after development is complete.
