I made a flask app which detects messages received on whatsapp using Twilio Webhooks. After receiving a message, the app sends a message back to the same phone number. This works perfectly using Flask and Ngrok to deploy the server and expose it. Once I deploy it to PythonAnywhere however, I get a 11200 error in the Twilio console. Here's the code.
from flask import Flask, request
import requests
from twilio.rest import Client
account_sid = 'xxxxx'
auth_token = 'xxxxx'
client = Client(account_sid, auth_token)
def mmsg(phono, body):
message = client.messages.create(
from_='whatsapp:+14155238886',
body=body,
to=phono,
)
app = Flask(__name__)
@app.route('/post', methods=['POST'])
def bot():
incoming_msg = request.values.get('Body', '').lower()
phono = request.values.get('From', "")
if incoming_msg == 'hi':
mmsg(phono, 'hello!')
if __name__ == '__main__':
app.run()
When I check the PythonAnywhere error logs, I get this
2020-07-19 13:50:46,569: POST Request: https://api.twilio.com/2010-04-01/Accounts/AC84a8b5837227246efc0c6f9440b6e12c/Messages.json
2020-07-19 13:50:46,570: PAYLOAD: {'To': 'whatsapp:{myphonenumber}', 'From': 'whatsapp:+14155238886', 'Body': 'hello!'}
2020-07-19 13:50:49,576: Exception on /post [POST]
Traceback (most recent call last):
requests.exceptions.ConnectionError: HTTPSConnectionPool(host='api.twilio.com', port=443): Max retries exceeded with url: /2010-04-01/Accounts/AC84a8b5837227246efc0c6f9440b6e12c/Messages.json (Caused by NewConnectionError('<urllib3.connection.HTTPSConnection object at 0x7fc0504362e8>: Failed to establish a new connection: [Errno 111] Connection refused',))
I have tried adding another key and value to the message = client.messages.create like this.
message = client.messages.create(
from_='whatsapp:+14155238886',
body=item,
to=phono,
AC84a8b5837227246efc0c6f9440b6e12c='83ce0b901ff353f9b9a77222e001d71d'
)
When I try that, I get this error on PythonAnywhere.
2020-07-19 14:09:51,030: Exception on /post [POST]
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/AbhayAysola/.virtualenvs/my-virtualenv/lib/python3.6/site-packages/flask/app.py", line 2447, in wsgi_app
response = self.full_dispatch_request()
File "/home/AbhayAysola/.virtualenvs/my-virtualenv/lib/python3.6/site-packages/flask/app.py", line 1952, in full_dispatch_request
rv = self.handle_user_exception(e)
File "/home/AbhayAysola/.virtualenvs/my-virtualenv/lib/python3.6/site-packages/flask/app.py", line 1821, in handle_user_exception
reraise(exc_type, exc_value, tb)
File "/home/AbhayAysola/.virtualenvs/my-virtualenv/lib/python3.6/site-packages/flask/_compat.py", line 39, in reraise
raise value
File "/home/AbhayAysola/.virtualenvs/my-virtualenv/lib/python3.6/site-packages/flask/app.py", line 1950, in full_dispatch_request
rv = self.dispatch_request()
File "/home/AbhayAysola/.virtualenvs/my-virtualenv/lib/python3.6/site-packages/flask/app.py", line 1936, in dispatch_request
return self.view_functions[rule.endpoint](**req.view_args)
File "/home/AbhayAysola/bot.py", line 46, in bot
mmsg(phono, ou)
File "/home/AbhayAysola/bot.py", line 24, in mmsg
AC84a8b5837227246efc0c6f9440b6e12c='83ce0b901ff353f9b9a77222e001d71d'
TypeError: create() got an unexpected keyword argument 'AC84a8b5837227246efc0c6f9440b6e12c'
Free accounts on PythonAnywhere have restricted Internet access; you can only access a specific set of sites (listed here, but this is a list of sites that you can access, not a list of sites that you can't access), and you have to use a proxy server to access them.
For most libraries that is completely transparent -- they pick up the proxy settings from the system environment and use it without you having to do anything extra. But the Twilio library needs a little bit of extra configuration. There's a help page explaining what this is here, but the specific change to your code would be to replace this:
client = Client(account_sid, auth_token)
...with this:
import os
from twilio.http.http_client import TwilioHttpClient
proxy_client = TwilioHttpClient(proxy={'http': os.environ['http_proxy'], 'https': os.environ['https_proxy']})
client = Client(account_sid, auth_token, http_client=proxy_client)