Company
Date Published
May 24, 2021
Author
Kevin Lewis
Word count
1497
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

This tutorial guides you through creating an Express.js application that can receive SMS messages using the Vonage Messages API and log them to an Airtable database. The application is set up to handle incoming messages, create new records in both the Numbers and Messages tables, and send confirmation SMS replies back to the sender. To complete the setup, you need a Vonage API account, Node.js installed on your machine, ngrok, and a local development environment. You also need to install dependencies such as `@vonage/server-sdk`, Express.js, and Airtable. The application is built using an Express.js server that listens for incoming messages on port 3000, which are then processed by the Vonage Messages API and logged to Airtable. Once set up correctly, you can test the application by sending SMS messages to your virtual phone number and verifying that they appear in both the Numbers and Messages tables of your Airtable database. The tutorial also covers error handling, creating new records for existing numbers, and sending confirmation SMS replies back to the sender.