Sulley

With Sulley, you can build SMS bots in just a few lines of code. Powered by Twilio & Plivo, it requires very minimal configuration and code to bring your SMS bot to life!

This project is inspired from Shuai Lin's slackbot.

Installation

From PyPI

Sulley can be installed from PyPI by running the following command:

pip install sulley

From source code

• Get the source code by cloning the repository

git clone https://github.com/sandeepraju/sulley.git

• In the project directory, run the setup.py

cd sulley/
python setup.py install

Getting started

Let us create a simple SMS bot using Sulley that greets it's users.

• Create a file called app.py.
• Add the following to your app.py file.

from sulley import Sulley

bot = Sulley()

@bot.reply_to(r'hi')
def say_hello(message):
    message.reply('hello!')

if __name__ == '__main__':
    bot.run()

• Grab a copy of config.json from here and place it in the same directory as app.py.
• Configure Sulley to use Twilio or Plivo by modifying key, secret and phone in the config.
• Now, run the app using the following command:

python app.py

More Examples

Binding functions that reply to simple commands

@bot.reply_to(r'hi')
def say_hello(message):
    message.reply('hello!')

Bind multiple commands to a single function

@bot.reply_to(r'hi')
@bot.reply_to(r'hey')
def say_hello(message):
  message.reply('hello')

More complex command matching rules using regex

@bot.reply_to(r'[0-9]abc')
def say_hello(message):
  message.reply('hello')

Pass native regex objects for more flexibility

@bot.reply_to(re.compile('^list', re.IGNORECASE))
def launch(message):
    message.reply('listing items')

For more examples, check out the examples file.

Configuration details

Sulley can be configured by creating a config.json file. By setting the SULLEY_CONFIG environment variable, Sulley reads this file on startup. If this environment variable is not set, it looks for the config.json file in the current working directory.

The SULLEY_CONFIG environment variable can be set like this:

export SULLEY_CONFIG=/path/to/config.json

To quickly get started, grab a copy of the config file from here.

Configuration options

The configuration options for Sulley are detailed below.

host

Default: "127.0.0.1" Description: host specifies the binding IP address which Sulley will listen on for requests from Twilio or Plivo for incoming SMS.

A simple example of how the host configuration looks:

{
    "host": "127.0.0.1"
}

port

Default: 5000 Description: port specifies the port on which Sulley listens to for requests from Twilio or Plivo for incoming SMS.

A simple example of how the port configuration looks:

{
    "port": 5000
}

provider

Default: No default value Description: provider defines the SMS provider to use. Currently, two popular SMS service providers - Twilio & Plivo are supported. The value for this config is a JSON object with the following sub options:

• name: Name of the provider in lowercase. Supports "twilio" or "plivo" currently.
• key: For twilio, this is the Account Sid and for plivo this is Auth ID found on their respective dashboards.
• secret: For both twilio and plivo, this is the Auth Token found on their respective dashboards.
• phone: The phone number (in E164 format. ex: +10000000000) where Sulley lives. This number will be used by Sulley's users to talk it. See how to do this on Twilio here and for Plivo here.
• url: The url where Sulley receives HTTP(s) requests from Twilio or Plivo for incoming SMS. Refer the Twilio & Plivo docs for more information.

A simple example of how the provider configuration looks:

{
    "provider": {
        "name": "twilio",
        "key": "add-key-here",
        "secret": "add-secret-here",
        "phone": "+10000000000",
        "url": "/sulley/"
    }
}

The above configuration specifies Sulley to use twilio to send and receive SMS. The phone number to which users send SMS to talk to Sulley is +10000000000.

Author

Sandeep Raju Prabhakar
me[AT]sandeepraju[DOT]in

License

BSD 3-Clause License

Copyright (c) 2016, Sandeep Raju Prabhakar
All rights reserved.

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:

* Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this
  list of conditions and the following disclaimer.

* Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice,
  this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation
  and/or other materials provided with the distribution.

* Neither the name of the copyright holder nor the names of its
  contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from
  this software without specific prior written permission.

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