Ahoy there coffee fanatics!
Anyone who has been to a conference knows the pressure of trying to grab your coffee before the next session starts. You come out of your session room and run smack into the coffee queue.
Twilio Barista is a simple .NET application that solves this problem by letting you place your coffee order via text message or Facebook Messenger* and then notifying you once your coffee is ready. No more queuing for coffee!
* Available to participants in Twilios Facebook Messenger Integration Developer Preview
In order to run your own Twilio Barista you'll need:
- Visual Studio 2015 and .NET 4.5
- A Twilio account
- A Pusher account
- At least one barista
Once you've got those requirements lined up get started by cloning this repository and updating the configuration values in web.config with your Twilio account credentials, Pusher account credentials and a username and password used to restrict access to portions of the Barista application:
<add key="TwilioSid" value="[YOUR_TWILIO_ACCOUND_SID]" />
<add key="TwilioToken" value="[YOUR_TWILIO_AUTH_TOKEN]" />
<!-- Pusher-->
<add key="PusherAppId" value="[YOUR_PUSHER_APP_ID]" />
<add key="PusherKey" value="[YOUR_PUSHER_KEY]" />
<add key="PusherSecret" value="[YOUR_PUSHER_SECRET]" />
<!-- Authentication -->
<add key="Realm" value="SMSBarista"/>
<add key="Username" value="[TWILIO_BARISTA_USERNAME]"/>
<add key="Password" value="[TWILIO_BARISTA_PASSWORD]"/>
In Visual Studio restore the required NuGet packages and build the project.
Setup and initialize the database by running EntityFrameworks update-database command from the Package Manager Console:
PM> update-database
Twilio Barista is now ready to accept coffee orders, but before we can do that we need to configure Twilio to send incoming text and Facebook messages to our app. Lets do that next.
Twilio Barista supports two methods of placing orders:
- sending a text message to a Twilio phone number or
- sending a message through Facebook Messenger from your Facebook page
Both types of messages use the same mechanism to let Twilio Barista know about the incoming message, a public URL.
Twilio will make an HTTP request to these URLs any time it receives an incoming text or Facebook Messenger message. Included in these HTTP requests are details like the incoming message text and the sender of the message which Twilio Barista uses to create a coffee order.
Twilio Barista already includes a route (/orders/create) that can accept, process and reply to incoming SMS and Facebook messages so all you need to do is make that route publicly accessible. Do that by deploying Twilio Barista to your favorite web host or by using a tool like ngrok to expose your own local web server to the internet through a public host name.
With your public URL in hand you can configure Twilio to accept incoming SMS messages or Facebook Messenger messages.
To configure ordering via SMS head to the Phone Numbers section of your Twilio Console and buy a new phone number.
Once purchased, configure the phone numbers Messaging Webhook with your public URL:
Save the phone number configuration and give Twilio Barista a test by sending a text message to your new phone number.
To configure ordering via Facebook Messenger configure your Facebook integration via the Twilio Console and set the Request URL to your public URL.
Open Facebook and send a message to your page via Messenger.