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Documentation Index

Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://plivo.com/docs/llms.txt

Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

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Overview

This guide shows how to send an SMS text message to any phone number. Businesses send text messages to notify customers about recent information, send alerts, and provide delivery status updates, among other use cases. You can start sending SMS messages either by using our PHLO visual workflow builder or our APIs. Follow the instructions in one of the tabs below.
Here’s how to use Plivo APIs to send outbound SMS text messages.

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How it works

Send SMS

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Prerequisites

To get started, you need a Plivo account — sign up with your work email address if you don’t have one already. If this is your first time using Plivo APIs, follow our instructions to set up a Python development environment.

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Create the send SMS application

Create a file called send_sms.py and paste into it this code.
import plivo

client = plivo.RestClient('<auth_id>','<auth_token>')
response = client.messages.create(
    src='<sender_id>',
    dst='<destination_number>',
    text='Hello, from Python!',)
print(response)
Replace the auth placeholders with your authentication credentials from the Plivo console. Replace the phone number placeholders with actual phone numbers in E.164 format (for example, +12025551234). In countries other than the US and Canada you can use a sender ID for the message source. You must have a Plivo phone number to send messages to the US or Canada; you can buy a Plivo number from Phone Numbers > Buy Numbers on the Plivo console or via the Numbers API.
Note: We recommend that you store your credentials in the auth_id and auth_token environment variables to avoid the possibility of accidentally committing them to source control. If you do this, you can initialize the client with no arguments and Plivo will automatically fetch the values from the environment variables. You can use os module(os.environ) to store environment variables and fetch them when initializing the client.

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Test

Save the file and run it.
$ python send_sms.py