Twilio Notifications

Overview

• Source: https://twilio.com
• Image Support: No
• Attachment Support: No
• Message Character Limits:
  • SMS: 160
  • Phone Call (TwiML): 4000
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Account Setup

To use Twilio, you will need to acquire your Account SID and Auth Token. Both of these are accessible via the Twilio Dashboard.

You’ll need to have a number defined as an Active Number (from your dashboard here). This will become your {FromPhoneNo} when identifying the details below.

Syntax

Valid syntax is as follows:

SMS (default)

• twilio://{AccountSID}:{AuthToken}@{FromPhoneNo}/{PhoneNo}
• twilio://{AccountSID}:{AuthToken}@{FromPhoneNo}/{PhoneNo1}/{PhoneNo2}/{PhoneNoN}

If no ToPhoneNo is specified, then the FromPhoneNo will be messaged instead; hence the following is a valid URL:

• twilio://{AccountSID}:{AuthToken}@{FromPhoneNo}/

Short Codes are also supported but require at least 1 Target PhoneNo:

• twilio://{AccountSID}:{AuthToken}@{ShortCode}/{PhoneNo}
• twilio://{AccountSID}:{AuthToken}@{ShortCode}/{PhoneNo1}/{PhoneNo2}/{PhoneNoN}

Phone Call

When method=call is specified, Twilio initiates an outbound phone call and reads the message body using TwiML. The body should be a valid TwiML document:

• twilio://{AccountSID}:{AuthToken}@{FromPhoneNo}/{PhoneNo}?method=call
• twilio://{AccountSID}:{AuthToken}@{FromPhoneNo}/{PhoneNo1}/{PhoneNo2}/{PhoneNoN}?method=call

Note

Phone calls do not support Short Codes or WhatsApp-prefixed numbers (w:).

Parameter Breakdown

Variable	Required	Description
AccountSID	Yes	The Account SID associated with your Twilio account. This is available to you via the Twilio Dashboard.
AuthToken	Yes	The Auth Token associated with your Twilio account. This is available to you via the Twilio Dashboard.
FromPhoneNo	*No	The Active Phone Number associated with your Twilio account you wish the SMS message or call to come from. It must be a number registered with Twilio. As an alternative to the FromPhoneNo, you may provide a ShortCode instead (SMS only). The phone number MUST include the country codes dialling prefix as well when placed. This field is also very friendly and supports brackets, spaces and hyphens in the event you want to format the number in an easy to read fashion.
ShortCode	*No	The ShortCode associated with your Twilio account you wish the SMS message to come from. It must be a number registered with Twilio. As an alternative to the ShortCode, you may provide a FromPhoneNo instead. Short Codes are not supported for phone calls.
PhoneNo	*No	A phone number MUST include the country codes dialling prefix as well when placed. This field is also very friendly and supports brackets, spaces and hyphens in the event you want to format the number in an easy to read fashion. Note: If you’re using a ShortCode, then at least one PhoneNo MUST be defined.
method	No	The notification method to use. Set to sms (default) to send a text message, or call to initiate an outbound phone call. When using call, the message body must be a valid TwiML document (e.g. <Response><Say>Hello</Say></Response>). WhatsApp (w:) prefixes and Short Codes are not compatible with method=call.
apikey	No	An optional Twilio API Key (beginning with SK). When provided, it is used instead of the Account SID for HTTP Basic authentication, which is the recommended approach for production use.

Note

This notification service does not use the title field; only the body is passed along.

Global Parameters

Variable	Description
overflow	This parameter can be set to either split, truncate, or upstream. This determines how Apprise delivers the message you pass it. By default this is set to upstream 👉 upstream: Do nothing at all; pass the message exactly as you received it to the service. 👉 truncate: Ensure that the message will fit within the service’s documented upstream message limit. If more information was passed then the defined limit, the overhead information is truncated. 👉 split: similar to truncate except if the message doesn’t fit within the service’s documented upstream message limit, it is split into smaller chunks and they are all delivered sequentially there-after.
format	This parameter can be set to either text, html, or markdown. Some services support the ability to post content by several different means. The default of this varies (it can be one of the 3 mentioned at any time depending on which service you choose). You can optionally force this setting to stray from the defaults if you wish. If the service doesn’t support different types of transmission formats, then this field is ignored.
verify	External requests made to secure locations (such as through the use of https) will have certificates associated with them. By default, Apprise will verify that these certificates are valid; if they are not then no notification will be sent to the source. In some occasions, a user might not have a certificate authority to verify the key against or they trust the source; in this case you will want to set this flag to no. By default it is set to yes.
redirect	By default, Apprise will follow HTTP redirects (3xx responses) issued by the remote server, matching the behaviour of the underlying requests library. If you want to prevent custom headers and credentials from being forwarded to destinations that differ from the original URL, set this to no. By default it is set to yes.
cto	This stands for Socket Connect Timeout. This is the number of seconds Requests will wait for your client to establish a connection to a remote machine (corresponding to the connect()) call on the socket. The default value is 4.0 seconds.
rto	This stands for Socket Read Timeout. This is the number of seconds the client will wait for the server to send a response. The default value is 4.0 seconds.
emojis	Enable Emoji support (such as providing :+1: would translate to 👍). By default this is set to no. Note: Depending on server side settings, the administrator has the power to disable emoji support at a global level; but default this is not the case.
tz	Identify the IANA Time Zone Database you wish to operate as. By default this is detected based on the configuration the server hosting Apprise is running on. You can set this to things like America/Toronto, or any other properly formated Timezone describing your area.
retry	The number of additional delivery attempts to make after the first failure before giving up. Accepts an integer in the range 0 to 10. The default is 0 (no retries — a single attempt is made). When combined with wait, Apprise pauses the specified number of seconds between each attempt.
wait	The number of seconds to pause between retry attempts. Accepts a decimal value in the range 0.0 to 20.0; integer values are promoted to float automatically. The default is 0.5. This value is only meaningful when retry is greater than zero — a service with retry=0 makes exactly one attempt regardless of the wait value.
optional	When set to yes, a delivery failure for this service is silently absorbed. The overall notify() call still returns True even if this endpoint was unreachable, provided that every required (non-optional) service in the same batch succeeded. Setting this flag does not skip delivery or bypass retry logic — all configured retry attempts are still made before the failure is absorbed. By default this is set to no, meaning every failure is propagated to the caller.

Examples

Send a Twilio Notification as an SMS:

# Assuming our {AccountSID} is AC735c307c62944b5a
# Assuming our {AuthToken} is e29dfbcebf390dee9
# Assuming our {FromPhoneNo} is +1-900-555-9999
# Assuming our {PhoneNo} - is in the US somewhere making our country code +1
#                        - identifies as 800-555-1223
apprise -vv -t "Test Message Title" -b "Test Message Body" \
   twilio://AC735c307c62944b5a:e29dfbcebf390dee9@19005559999/18005551223

# the following would also have worked (spaces, brackets,
# dashes are accepted in a phone no field):
apprise -vv -t "Test Message Title" -b "Test Message Body" \
   twilio://AC735c307c62944b5a:e29dfbcebf390dee9@1-(900) 555-9999/1-(800) 555-1223

Send a Twilio Notification as a phone call using TwiML:

# Assuming our {AccountSID} is AC735c307c62944b5a
# Assuming our {AuthToken} is e29dfbcebf390dee9
# Assuming our {FromPhoneNo} is +1-900-555-9999
# Assuming our {PhoneNo} is +1-800-555-1223
apprise -vv -t "Test Message Title" \
   -b "<Response><Say>Test Message Body</Say></Response>" \
   "twilio://AC735c307c62944b5a:e29dfbcebf390dee9@19005559999/18005551223?method=call"

WhatsApp Support

If your account is configured to support WhatsApp for Buisness you can also use this plugin to notify those endpoints as well. Simply place a w: infront of the outbound phone numbers that should be delivered through WhatsApp instead of the default Twillio configuration: e.g:

# Assuming our {AccountSID} is AC735c307c62944b5a
# Assuming our {AuthToken} is e29dfbcebf390dee9
# Assuming our {FromPhoneNo} is +1-900-555-9999
# Assuming our WhatsApp {PhoneNo} is +1 555 123 3456
apprise -vv -t "Test Message Title" -b "Test Message Body" \
   twilio://AC735c307c62944b5a:e29dfbcebf390dee9@19005559999/w:15551233456

# the following would also have worked (spaces, brackets,
# dashes are accepted in a phone no field):
apprise -vv -t "Test Message Title" -b "Test Message Body" \
   twilio://AC735c307c62944b5a:e29dfbcebf390dee9@1-(900) 555-9999/w:+1 555 123 3456

You can also place a w: infront of your own phone number to switch the default behavior to interpret all of the numbers that follow to be sent to WhatsApp. For example: twillio://credentials/w:18005559876/15551234444/15551235555

In the above example, the target numbers 15551234444 and 15551235555 would have been sent through WhatsApp because the default switch of how to treat the numbers was switched by prefixing the source with w: instead.

Note: Sources with Short Codes will not work for WhatsApp.