Sending PR notifications through SMS and GitHub Actions

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twilio-labs / actions-sms

Send an SMS through GitHub Actions

Twilio SMS GitHub Action

Send an SMS from GitHub Actions.

Prerequisites

• A Twilio Account. Sign up for free
• A Twilio API Key and Secret

Usage

1. Set up your credentials as secrets in your repository settings using TWILIO_ACCOUNT_SID, TWILIO_API_KEY, TWILIO_API_SECRET

2. Add the following to your workflow

name: Twilio Sned
on
  workflow_dispatch: # allows you to manually trigger the workflow
  schedule: # runs on a cron, nightly
    - cron: 0 0 * * * 
env:
    TWILIO_ACCOUNT_SID: ${{ secrets.TWILIO_ACCOUNT_SID }}
    TWILIO_API_KEY: ${{ secrets.TWILIO_API_KEY }}
    TWILIO_API_SECRET: ${{ secrets.TWILIO_API_SECRET }}
permissions:
  contents: read
jobs:
  send:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: 'Sending SMS Notification'
        uses: twilio-labs/actions-sms@v1
        with:
          fromPhoneNumber: '[phone]' # alternatively, use a Repository Secret
          toPhoneNumber: '[phone]' # alternatively, use a Repository Secret
          message: 'Hello from

…

View on GitHub

To begin, you will need a GitHub Actions workflow YAML. I copied mine directly from the twilio-labs/actions-sms. The Twilio team maintains the action from an open-source repo, so if you have questions or looking for other features, definitely reach out to them there.

name: PR text MSG
on: [pull_request]
jobs:
  text:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
    - name: 'Sending SMS Notification'
      uses: twilio-labs/actions-sms@v1
      with:
        fromPhoneNumber: '[phone]'
        toPhoneNumber: ${{ secrets.PAGER_NUMBER }}
        message: 'Hello from Twilio'
      env:
        TWILIO_ACCOUNT_SID: ${{ secrets.TWILIO_ACCOUNT_SID }}
        TWILIO_API_KEY: ${{ secrets.TWILIO_API_KEY }}
        TWILIO_API_SECRET: ${{ secrets.TWILIO_API_SECRET }}

Something to keep in mind is that you will need a Twilio trial account and create a Programmable Messaging service to generate your secret key and SID. If you are also curious about how to set up secrets in a GitHub rep, check out my previous article on The Secrets of An Authenticated GitHub Action Workflow
. You will want to put the PAGER_NUMBER in a secret too.

Finally, set sending phone numbers to the one generated in Twilio. Also, to trigger the action I have it set to pull_request, but for testing, purposes you can also set it as workflow_dispatch.

And that is it. Enjoy your new text messages.

This is part of my 28 days of Actions series. To get notified of more GitHub Action tips, follow the GitHub organization right here on Dev. Learn how to build action with Node.js

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