Twilio API for beginners

Looking for an awesome Twilio API tutorial? This probably isn’t it but feel free to continue…

What is Twilio?

Twilio is a company that provides voice and SMS services for your application or website.

What do I need to start?

– Hosting solution
– Composer

What am I missing?

This tutorial is not on the process of setting up a server, so I will be skipping those parts right now. I also expect that you know PHP already and can implement basic OOP applications.

Easy Twilio API starts here

First, create a composer.json manually or using “composer init” in the command line. Your file’s contents should look something like this:

{
    "name": "dj/sms",
    "license": "MIT",
    "authors": [
        {
            "name": "Randi Miller",
            "email": "randi@devjunkies.net"
        }
    ],
    "require": {
    "twilio/sdk": "*"
    }
}

Now that your composer.json file is setup, run the “composer install” command to install the vendor packages. Create a file named sms.php in the same directory level as composer.json.

Inside the file you will need to require the composer autoload.php to add the Twilio SDK to the namespace.

require('vendor/autoload.php');

Then you want to add your Twilio SID and token so that Twilio knows what person is using their API.

$sid = 'Enter SID here';
$token = 'Enter token here';

Now we can initialize the Services_Twilio object.

$twilio = new Services_Twilio($sid, $token);

Using your object, you can now create an SMS message and send it to a loved one <3

$twilio->account->messages->create(array(
'To' => "Loved one's Phone #",
'From' => "Twilio Phone #",
'Body' => "The message you want to send goes here!!!",
));

Just run the sms.php script and BAMMM! You have SMS abilities. Now what will you do since you are the best Twilio developer?