A Twilio-based cell phone dump

When I moved abroad, I wanted to keep my U.S. cell phone number because I've had it forever, and because I have a lot of things that are still attached to this number. Twilio allows you to port your phone number to them and hold onto it for $1 USD per month, which was a perfect option. Even better, Twilio allows you to execute web addresses upon receipt of a call or SMS and MMS -- an even more perfect option.

The problem, though, is while Twilio offers a few hosted options (called Twimlets), they are not very feature-rich. Specifically, there exists no option to receive an email upon receipt of a text message. Thus, like any good hacker, I coded my own, hence this project. (I still use Twimlets, but only as a fallback if my scripts are inaccessible.)

• Twilio - Obviously, none of this will work without a Twilio account and active phone number.

• PHP - The main TwiML scripts are coded in PHP, because reasons. The Gearman worker is, too, but this will eventually change (see TODO below).

  • Modules: curl, dom (with xml), json

• Gearman (Optional) - Asynchronous job handler. I added this so the TwiML scripts could respond immediately to Twilio, but still queue jobs to fetch the call/text data (e.g. MMS attachments or voicemail MP3s).

  • Debian Packages: gearman-job-server, libgearman-client-perl, pecl-gearman
  • This dependency is optional if you want the media files downloaded locally. If not, the media files will be accessible only on Twilio's servers.

• Monit (Optional) - Process uptime and resource monitor. Used to make sure the Gearman worker script stays active and doesn't eat memory/CPU like crazy.

• The Gearman worker should be coded in Perl, simply because PHP is meant to die. Right now it's in PHP for a proof-of-concept (since the libraries are super simple), but PHP leaks memory like a sieve. Thus far, though, it seems to be holding stable with memory consumption, so we'll see...

• Add a MariaDB (MySQL) backend to store call and text data.

• Add some frontend so I can interact with the MySQL-stored content, as well as send texts (SMS and MMS) and perhaps use other parts of the Twilio REST API.