Being that we live in a DevOps world and all, the application I work on sends me texts when it looks like things are going wrong in production, even though I am a developer and not a systems administrator. For months, I have been mildly annoyed that these texts originate from a variety of phone numbers preventing my phone from categorizing them nicely and forcing me to delete them individually to keep my texts organized.
The texts have been sent through the email-to-text gateway provided by AT&T. My scripts email a message to [email protected] and it arrives as a text message on my phone. Unfortunately, there’s no way to control the originating phone number when you use that approach.
It occurred to me that I may be able to use Google Voice to get around this problem. You can send texts from a Google Voice account, and I figured they had some kind of API that would let you do it. I went and set up a Google Voice account associated with my work email and then quickly discovered that there is no Web service that you can use to access Google Voice.
However, some enterprising person has created a Python library that accesses Google Voice through the regular Web interface. I did some testing and found that I could send the texts using the library. Unfortunately, I’m not allowed to install random Python libraries on our production servers. I had been hoping I could just use the curl utility to send the texts so that I could avoid having to ask our systems administrator to install anything but the Python library was the only option.
Fortunately, I have my own virtual server, so I wrote a simple Python CGI script that sends the texts and installed it on that server. Here’s the source:
#!/usr/bin/env python
import cgitb, cgi
from googlevoice import Voice
from googlevoice.util import input
cgitb.enable()
form = cgi.FieldStorage()
phoneNumber = form.getfirst("phone", "")
text = form.getfirst("text", "")
if len(phoneNumber) == 10 and len(text) > 0:
voice = Voice()
voice.login("USERNAME", "PASSWORD")
voice.send_sms(phoneNumber, text)
print "Content-Type: text/html"
print
print "<html><body>SMS Sent</body></html>"
So now my monitoring script sends the alert using curl to access the CGI script on my personal server, which in turn uses pygooglevoice to access Google Voice via screen scraping, which then sends me a text from a specific phone number. I don’t rate this approach very highly in terms of robustness, but at least my texts are now properly organized.
August 7, 2011 at 11:18 am
This seems awfully fragile. It seems likely that at some point, you’ll miss vital texts because Google changed the UI for Voice.
August 7, 2011 at 11:19 am
It is. The script emails me as well. I also made this change only for me — the other people who are alerted still get them the old fashioned, more reliable way.
August 7, 2011 at 12:26 pm
Try Twillio, send SMS messages programmatically.
If you’re using log4X then you could set up a custom logger that writes straight to twillio. Then you could turn it off pretty easily via config when you went on vacation.
http://www.twilio.com/