How to Send a Text Message with Python

Time to read: 2 minutes

April 21, 2016
Written by
Sam Agnew
Twilion

PythonHeaderImage

You’re building a Django or Flask app and you need to send text messages. Did you know you could do it in only 44 seconds? Here’s a video to show you how quick it is to get started:

Video: How To Send a Text Message with Python in 44 Seconds


You can’t copy and paste code from a video, so maybe that’s not very helpful. Here’s all of the code you would need:

from twilio.rest import TwilioRestClient

client = TwilioRestClient()

client.messages.create(from_='YOUR_NUMBER',
                       to='YOUR_TWILIO_NUMBER',
                       body='Ahoy from Twilio!')

How do I run this?

If you want to run that code, open a file called send_sms.py and copy and paste that code into it. Don’t forget to replace the to and from_ phone numbers with their appropriate values.

Grab your Account SID and auth token from your Twilio account Console. Set these in your environment variables by entering this in your terminal:

export TWILIO_ACCOUNT_SID='YOUR_ACCOUNT_SID'
export TWILIO_AUTH_TOKEN='YOUR_AUTH_TOKEN'

If you had trouble setting your environment variables or are running Windows, check out this blog post. Now enter this in your terminal to install the Twilio Python library and run your code (from the same directory the file is saved in):

pip install twilio
python send_sms.py

What just happened?

Let’s walk through the code in the video step by step.

First you import the Twilio Rest Client

from twilio.rest import TwilioRestClient

Instantiate a REST client using your account sid and auth token, available in your Twilio account Console:

client = TwilioRestClient('TWILIO_ACCOUNT_SID', 'TWILIO_AUTH_TOKEN')

In the video and earlier in the post, these are stored in environment variables.

You’ll now need three things:

  • The number you are sending the message to
  • The Twilio number you are sending the message from
  • The body of the message

With these you can now send a text message by calling client.sendMessage():

client.messages.create(from_='YOUR_NUMBER',
                       to='YOUR_TWILIO_NUMBER',
                       body='Ahoy from Twilio!')

Now just wait for the magic to happen!

We can’t wait to see what you build

You’ve sent a text message and now you’re ready to take on the world. Check out the Twilio REST API documentation and the documentation for working with the Python helper library to see what else you can do.

You can also take a look at our tutorials to see more examples such as: sending SMS notifications, masking phone numbers for user privacy or two factor authentication for user security.

I’m looking forward to seeing what you will build. Feel free to reach out and share your experiences or ask any questions.

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