SMS Notifications for Node.js and Express

This example project demonstrates how to send SMS notifications (for a mobile marketing campaign) using Node.js and Express.

Running the Project in production

Step 1: Deploy to Heroku

Hit the button!

Step 2: Configure your Twilio number

Go to your dashboard on Twilio. Click on Twilio Numbers and choose a number to setup.

On the phone number page, enter https://<appname.herokuapp.com>/message into the Messaging Request URL field.

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Step 3: Wrap Up!

Now your subscribers will be able to text your new Twilio number to 'Subscribe' to your Marketing Notifications line.

Congratulations!

Running the Project on Your Machine

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.

Step 1: Install Dependencies

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.

Step 2: Configuration

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. Our application will be looking for a fully qualified MongoDB connection string with a username and password embedded in it.

Step 3: Running the Project

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 .

Step 4: Exposing Webhooks to Twilio

You will likely need to expose your local Node.js web application on the public Internet to work with Twilio. We recommend using ngrok to accomplish this. 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.com (reserved subdomains are a paid feature of ngrok):

ngrok -subdomain=chunky-danger-monkey 3000

License

MIT