Action Texter is a framework for delivering text messages from Rails apps. Its designed to be immediately familiar to anyone who has used Action Mailer, and is in fact largely lifted from that project. Like Action Mailer, it is essentially a wrapper around Action Controller that allows methods to be defined for sending messages that use view templates to construct the body.
Note: At the moment, this gem is pretty simple and only addresses its author’s immediate needs. As such, testing is unaddressed (though should be simple to add in the spirit of Action Mailer tests), receiving messages isn’t supported, and Twilio is the only real delivery method. There are also plenty of places where the implementation is a bit sloppy, since I started by literally copying actionmailer and modifying from there.
The framework works by initializing any instance variables you want to be available in the SMS template, followed by a call to sms to deliver the message.
This can be as simple as:
class Notifier < ActionTexter::Base delivers_from '+14155551234' def welcome(recipient) @recipient = recipient sms(:to => recipient) end end
You can pass either a single recipient or an array of recipients via the :to option.
The body of the message is created by using an Action View template (regular ERB) that has the instance variables that are declared in the texter action.
So the corresponding body template for the method above could look like this:
Hello there, <%= @recipient %>. Thank you for signing up!
Calling the method returns a Message object:
message = Notifier.welcome # => Returns a ActionTexter::Message object message.deliver # => delivers the message
Or you can just chain the methods together like:
Notifier.welcome.deliver # Creates the message and sends it immediately
It is possible to set default values that will be used in every method in your Action Texter class. To implement this functionality, you just call the public class method default which you get for free from ActionTexter::Base. This method accepts a Hash as the parameter.
Note that every value you set with this method will get over written if you use the same key in your texter method.
The latest version of Action Texter can be installed with RubyGems:
% [sudo] gem install action_texter
Source code can be downloaded from GitHub
Action Texter is released under the MIT license.
Bug reports and feature requests can be filed on GitHub