Build a SMS notification service

Automated event notification is useful for many applications. In a recent blog post, I presented a solution how to use Twitter for notifying about server events. In this post you learn how to achieve the same by using an SMS API. The rationale behind an SMS service is its robust availability.

There exist plenty of different services, I chose ClockworkSMS, as it provides a simple interface for several programming languages, plugins and a prepaid billing service. Once you registered and bought some credit, you can start using the API. Integrating the service into your applications is easy, as there does not only exist libraries for several languages (C#, Java, Node.js, PHP, Python, Ruby), but also HTTP requests are supported. Thus you can also send SMS text messages from command line. When you execute the following command in bash, a SMS message will be sent to the number provided containing the text, no magic involved.

curl https://api.clockworksms.com/http/send.aspx -d "key=YOUR-API-KEY&to=4361122334455&content=Hello+World"

Simply insert your personal API key, provide the receiver’s phone number and of course the content. The text of the message needs to be URL encoded. In order to advance the notification service, you can provide a call back URL which is called whenever a SMS message was sent.

Clockworksms provides HTTP GET, form posts and XML (bulk) POST requests which are issued against the URL provided. The service appends message metadata such as an id, a status code an the number of the receiver to the request. This information can be processed in custom applications which react on the data. In the easiest scenario, you can setup a virtual host and process the log files. Each sent SMS message will result to a request from the Clockworksms servers to your server and thus create a log record with the metadata of the sms message.

89.111.58.18 - - [30/Oct/2014:18:21:32 +0100] "GET /smsnotification.htm?msg_id=VE_282415671&status=DELIVRD&detail=0&to=4361122334455 HTTP/1.1" 200 330

The ClockworkSMS service also provides some plugins for WordPress, Nagios and other applications.