SMS Notification Guide

👀 Overview

SMS Notifications in Django Spire are reliant on Twilio's REST API.

🎚️ Throttling and Batch Sizes

SMS notifications are processed in batches of 100 message segments and are intended to be processed in 5-minute intervals. This is because Twilio's SMS API has a limit of one message per second (for basic accounts), and has a queue limit of 36,000 segments. (see Twilio's documentation).

See Twilio's rate limits for more details.

📱 Twilio Credentials

Twilio's credentials must be provided in the TWILIO_ACCOUNT_SID and TWILIO_AUTH_TOKEN environment variables. Additionally, the TWILIO_SMS_BATCH_SIZE environment variable must be set to the number of SMS messages to send per batch. We recommend 100, as this is the maximum number of messages that can be sent per batch, but this can be changed as needed.

Example

We must first create the Notification object before we create the SmsNotification object. Once both objects have been created, we are done! Having a automation that runs notification.automations will handle the rest! For further details on the automations please see the Automations guide.

from django.contrib.contenttypes.models import ContentType
from django.urls import reverse

from django.utils.timezone import now

from django_spire.notification.models import Notification
from django_spire.notification.choices import NotificationTypeChoices

from django_spire.notification.sms.models import SmsNotification

from foo.models import Foo # import your models here

foo = Foo.objects.get(...)

# Create Notification Object
notification = Notification.objects.create(
    content_type=ContentType.objects.get_for_model(foo),
    object_id=foo.id,
    title='This Notification is About Foo!',
    body='Foo is a very good name when trying to abstract out specific'
         ' logic that is not needed to solve the problem at hand.',
    url=reverse(
        'foo:page:detail',
        kwargs={'pk': foo.id}
    ),
    type=NotificationTypeChoices.SMS,
    user=some_user,
    publish_datetime=now()
)

# Create SmsNotification
SmsNotification.objects.create(
    notification=notification,
    to_phone_number='+1234567890'
)