Customer Service with Twilio Video

This is an example application demonstration a customer service use case with Python and the Flask web framework. In addition, this project contains other third-party modules in the requirements.txt file that may be useful in creating application with Twilio.

Deploy On Heroku

When deploying from the commandline instead of the Heroku Deploy button, use the following commands from the root of the project directory.

    heroku create

    heroku config:set SECRET_KEY='something super secret'
    heroku config:set TWILIO_ACCOUNT_SID='ACxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx'
    heroku config:set TWILIO_AUTH_TOKEN='xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx'
    heroku config:set DATABASE_URL='postgresql://user:passwd@localhost/videoflask'
    
    heroku addons:add heroku-postgresql

    git push heroku master

    heroku run python create_db.py

Running the Project on Your Machine

Development environment requirements:

• PostgreSQL with access to create a database such as "videoflask"
• virtualenv and pip to install dependencies.

1. Create a new virtualenv.

    virtualenv videoflask
    source videoflask/bin/activate
   

2. Clone repository at https://github.com/TwilioDevEd/video-service-flask

    git clone [email protected]:TwilioDevEd/video-service-flask
   

3. Change into the new directory.

    cd video-service-flask
   

4. Install local dependencies.

    pip install -r requirements.txt
   

5. Set environment variables. Make sure to replace the values with your own environment settings.

    export DEBUG=True
    export SECRET_KEY='super secret key'
    export DATABASE_URL='postgresql://user:passwd@localhost/videoflask'
    export TWILIO_ACCOUNT_SID='ACxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx'
    export TWILIO_AUTH_TOKEN='ACxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx'
   

6. Create database and schema.

    createdb videoflask
    python create_db.py
   

7. Run the app.

    python run.py
   

Open web browser and head to http://localhost:5000/ to see your local app running.

Exposing Webhooks to Twilio

You will likely need to expose your local Flask web application on the public Internet to work with Twilio. We recommend using ngrok to accomplish this. Use ngrok to expose a local port and get a publicly accessible URL you can use to accept oncoming calls or texts to your Twilio numbers.

The following example would expose your local Flask application running on port 5000 at http://meow-danger-cat.ngrok.com (reserved subdomains are a paid feature of ngrok):

ngrok -subdomain=meow-danger-cat 5000

License

MIT