Programmable Messaging Quickstarts

Note that this full tutorial is not available in curl, even though our examples throughout Twilio documentation of individual API calls nearly always include a curl variant. It is a very simple matter to make a call to create and send an SMS message in curl, specifying your Account SID and auth token, the sender and recipient numbers and the text message body. This is detailed on the SMS resource page, among other places. However, the other steps covered in the language-specific quickstarts linked above--receiving inbound text messages and replying programmatically to these inbound messages-- require setting up a free-standing application in your local environment in the specified language/framework, including a webhook to receive and respond to incoming SMS messages, and then exposing this webhook as a public url (we recommend doing this by way of ngrok). None of this is possible using curl alone, which is a command-line tool intended for discrete server calls from a terminal (in our case, calls to a Twilio REST API). While not a multi-procedure scripting language like the ones listed in the links above, curl is.a simple and powerful way to verify the functionality of discrete API calls from the command line.