Push Twilio alerts to Slack Channel directly

Question

I am not sure that there is way but can I send Twilio alerts from Twilio Console to Slack channel directly without using Python or any web framework that will listen to Twilio requests and send the data to Slack channel?

Using Twilio console, I can trigger a webhook from there once there is a new error but the Slack requires a data in the API.

Thank you

Answer 1

Twilio developer evangelist here.

It looks as though Slack expects webhooks to be in JSON format in a particular format, in the simplest form an object with a text property.

Twilio webhooks are sent in application/x-www-form-urlencoded format with the parameters listed here.

In order to turn this into a webhook that Slack will understand you will need some code or service that will translate the form encoded request into a JSON request with the right fields.

It seems you are reticent to build and host something yourself. If the hosting is the problem, can I suggest you look into Twilio Functions to build this. Twilio Functions lets you host JavaScript functions that can respond to incoming HTTP requests.

An example of a Twilio Function that could translate these alert webhooks into a Slack webhook might look like this:

const got = require('got');

exports.handler = async function (context, event, callback) {
  const slackUrl = context.SLACK_URL;
  const { ErrorCode, Description, AccountSid } = event;

  const message = `New error for Twilio Account ${AccountSid}.\n\n${ErrorCode}: ${Description}`

  try {
    await got(slackUrl, {
      method: "POST",
      headers: {
        "Content-Type": "application/json"
      },
      body: JSON.stringify({ text: message })
    })
    callback(null, "<Response/>");
  } catch(error) {
    callback(error);
  }
}

The above code is untested, but should give you a good a start. It uses got to make the HTTP request to the Slack webhook URL. In this case, the webhook URL is stored in an environment variable.