Never Forget A Friend's Birthday with Python, Flask and Twilio

This app lets you:

• import your Facebook birthday calendar,
• send SMS notification messages of upcoming birthdays,
• send text messages and simple ecards via SMS.

1. Clone this repo:

    $ git clone https://github.com/pybites/bday-app
   

2. Make a virtual env and install dependencies:

    $ cd bday-app
    $ python3 -m venv venv
    $ source venv/bin/activate
    $ pip install -r requirements.txt
   

3. Create a Twilio account, get a phone number and API key (sid) and token.

4. Copy the settings template in place:

    $ cp env-example.conf env.conf
   

5. Update it with the correct settings:

   • flask - secret = set this to a random, hard to guess string (see Flask docs)
   • twilio_api - sid + token = obtained in step 3
   • phones - twilio = obtained in step 3
   • phones - admin = your (verified) mobile phone number, where you want to receive notification messages
   • login - user + password = define your login credentials for the Flask app
   • server - url = unchanged if running locally, update to base URL if deployed elsewhere (so far I only tested it on my localhost)

NOTE: make sure you use E.164 number formatting for phone numbers (e.g. +34666555444, +442071838750). See Twilio's support article: Formatting International Phone Numbers.

6. Import your FB calendar into local SQLite database with birthdays

   • Export your birthday calendar from Facebook and save it as cal.ics in the app's toplevel directory.

     

   • Run model.py to import the birthdays into the DB. Use it with -t if you want to strip out real names.

       $ python model.py
     

This app has two parts:

1. The notifier which checks once a day for birthdays. If there are one or more birthdays that day it sends out an SMS to your configured admin phone. You need to run this as a background job so use nohup:

    $ nohup ./notify.py &
   

2. The front-end is a Flask app which you can invoke with:

    $ python app.py
   

Note that for both scripts you need to have your virtualenv enabled.