How to Send Customers Text Messages Using Django & Twilio

1) Create a Django project

C:\Users\Owner\Desktop\code>py -m venv text
C:\Users\Owner\Desktop\code>cd text
C:\Users\Owner\Desktop\code\text>Scripts\activate
(text) C:\Users\Owner\Desktop\code\text>pip install Django
(text) C:\Users\Owner\Desktop\code\text>django-admin startproject mysite
(text) C:\Users\Owner\Desktop\code\text>cd mysite
(text) C:\Users\Owner\Desktop\code\text\mysite>py manage.py startapp main

2) Configure Django settings.py

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    'main.apps.MainConfig', #add this
    ...
]

3) Create a superuser

py manage.py createsuperuser

4) Install the django-phonenumber-field package

pip install django-phonenumber-field[phonenumbers]

5) Add django-phonenumber-field to the settings.py

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    ...
    'phonenumber_field', #add this
    ...
]

6) Create the model in models.py

from django.db import models
from phonenumber_field.modelfields import PhoneNumberField

class Customer(models.Model):
  name = models.CharField(max_length=200)
  phone_number = PhoneNumberField()

7) Make migrations and migrate

py manage.py makemigrations

py manage.py migrate

8) Add the model to the admin.py

from django.contrib import admin
from .models import Customer

admin.site.register(Customer)

9) Add a customer via the Django admin panel

10) Install the official Twilio Python helper library

pip install twilio

11) Visit twilio.com, create a trial account, choose a trail phone number, and locate your ACCOUNT SID and AUTH TOKEN

12) Add your ACCOUNT SID and AUTH TOKEN to the Django settings.py.
These variables should be kept safe in production using a solution such as python-decouple.

TWILIO_ACCOUNT_SID = 'YOUR_ID_HERE'
TWILIO_AUTH_TOKEN = 'YOUR_TOKEN_HERE'

13) Handle text message setup in the admin.py

from django.contrib import admin
from .models import Customer
from twilio.rest import Client
from django.conf import settings

def send_text(modeladmin, request, queryset):
  client = Client(settings.TWILIO_ACCOUNT_SID, settings.TWILIO_AUTH_TOKEN)
  for customer in queryset:
    message = client.messages.create(
      to= str(customer.phone_number), 
      from_="[phone]", # insert trial number 
      body="Hey I hope you received this message") # insert message
send_text.short_description = "Send text campaign"
class CustomerAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
  fields = ('name', 'phone_number')
  actions = [send_text]
admin.site.register(Customer, CustomerAdmin)

14) Log back into the Django admin panel, select the customers model, select the customers, change the action to "Send text campaign" and click "Go" to send the text.

Django and Twilio Quickstart Guide