Twilio Conversations - Receive Messages on Your Webhook

This article is part of the Twilio Conversations API series

In this article, you will learn how to receive a message sent by another Participant in a Conversation. At this point, you should have a Conversation created with two SMS Participants in it. One participant has a mobile number and the other Participant is you sending a message from a Twilio phone number.

The first thing you need to do is turn on webhook events when a new message arrives in a Conversation. You would just need to turn on the “onMessageAdded” webhook under the Conversations API Webhook config panel within your Twilio Console

Then you will need to set up a URL to receive these webhook events from Twilio. To quickly get started, let’s setup a default Node.js project with the defaults

npm init -y

This should create a package.json and index.js file. Following that, let’s install express and some necessary packages for standing up a webhook URL

npm i express body-parser nodemon http

Add the start script to the “scripts” section of package.json

"start": "node index.js"

Next, you’re going to add this boilerplate code and a route for receiving webhooks. For now, we’re just going to do a quick test to ensure Twilio’s webhooks are coming through to our Node.js server.

const express = require("express");
const bodyParser = require("body-parser");
const http = require("http");
const app = express();
let port = process.env.PORT || 3001;
const server = http.createServer(app);

app.use(bodyParser.json());

app.use(bodyParser.urlencoded({ extended: true }));

app.post("/conversations/webhook", (req, res) => {
  console.log(req.body);
});

server.listen(port, () => console.log(`Listening on port ${port}`));

This article is part of the Twilio Conversations API series

You should already have a Participant with a mobile phone number and a Twilio phone number participant added to a Conversation at this point. If not, check out previous articles to learn how to do this.

If you send a text message from your phone to the Twilio number you added as a Participant to the Conversation, you should see a JSON payload similar to the below come through on your webhook. I have put in dummy values for the unique identifiers for obvious reasons.

{
  "RetryCount": "0",
  "EventType": "onMessageAdded",
  "Attributes": "{}",
  "DateCreated": "2021-06-18T15:19:56.205Z",
  "Author": "+1XXXXXXXXXX",
  "Index": "9",
  "MessageSid": "IMXXXXXXXXXXX1XXXXXXXXXX",
  "ParticipantSid": "MBXXXXXXXXXXX1XXXXXXXXXX",
  "Body": "This is the text message from my phone",
  "AccountSid": "ACXXXXXXXXXXXX1XXXXXXXXXX",
  "Source": "SMS",
  "ConversationSid": "CHXXXXXXXXXXX1XXXXXXXXXX"
}

Interested in learning more about Twilio Conversations? Check out my upcoming eBook on Twilio Conversations and other articles.