How do I use Twilio to receive text messages from users and reply to that text with a message?

Question

1.) User sends a text message to a designated Twilio phone number 2.) Application receives this message and parses it for actionable data 3.) Application replies to sender with a text message delivering the requested information

How the heck do I do this with rails?!

Answer 1

Assuming your business logic doesn't take that long to execute, it's pretty simple to process a text and send a response. Here are the core steps:

1. Grab the twilio-ruby helper library.
2. Point your SMS Url to the Rails controller/action you'd like to invoke
3. Process the incoming request & execute your business logic
4. Instead of returning HTML, return TwiML

Here's a link to a simple app that does just this:

https://github.com/crabasa/twilio-rails-demo

Update: I've written two detailed blog posts on integration Twilio into a Rails 4.x app: Part 1 and Part 2.