Receiving SMS and webhook setup for SMS notifications

The easiest way to see the SMS that were sent as a reply to your messages is our chat console, where you can see all the SMS that you have sent to your customers, and their replies, and send even have an SMS conversation with them, just like using a chat application.

However, if you would like to handle inbound and outbound SMS yourself, e.g. do some automated actions when you send or receive them, or send a notification to yourself, you can provide a webhook (callback url) that we will send you an HTTP POST request to when that happens.

To start receiving requests for the messages, head out to our API console, and under Webhook settings, fill out your endpoint URL, and fill out or generate a secret that we will send you in our request body, so you can verify that the requests are coming from us (only you and us know that secret). You can enter two webhooks there. One that notifies you about the received messages, and the other notifies you about the messages you sent.

To handle our HTTP POST request, you can use any web application framework, such as Laravel, Django, Express.js, Spring or ASP.NET.

Here is the example of the endpoint definition for Express.js:

const express = require("express");
const app = express()
app.use(express.json())

app.post("/webhook-endpoint", (req, res) => {
    if (req.body.secret != "YOUR_WEBHOOK_SECRET")
        return res.status(401).json({ ok: false });
    
    const { phone_number, text, sent/* ... other fields */ } = req.body;
    if(!sent)
        console.log("received");
    res.status(200).json({ ok: true });
})

app.listen(80);

The request consists of a JSON body with these fields:

• phone_number, the sender phone number

• text, the message body

• secret, it should be the same as the secret that you have provided in the API console

• sent, boolean, true if you sent the message, false otherwise

• received, boolean, true if you received the message, false otherwise

• timestamp, JS timestamp (miliseconds)

• portal, only in sent messages, boolean, true if you sent the message from TextLink console

If your webhook does not return status 200, we will assume that the request was not successful, and we will notify you about it via e-mail. You can also just click the Test webhook button on our API console, to receive a test message to your webhook, and see if it works.