This script schedules sending out SMS messages via Twilio. Scheduling information is read in from a spreadsheet and scheduling itself is handled via crontab.
The script takes in four positional arguments:
- A path to a spreadsheet with information on the sending and receiving phone number, date and time stamps for each message, and the message itself (see below for more information about the format).
- A path to an output folder where the mesages will be stored.
- Your Twilio account SID (account string identifier).
- Your Twilio authentication token.
An example spreadsheet is available under see ./example_sheet/example_input.xlsx.
The first four lines of the spreadsheet are reserved for a message ID (ID), the sender number (from), the receiver number (to), and headers for the remaining data lines. For these first four lines, you only need to edit information in column B, row 1-3.
Line 5 and 6 in the example are data lines. Column A shows the date and time stamp that should be entered in the format: 'DD/MM/YYYY HH:MM:SS'. Column B is where you enter the text message.
Messages to be send are written out to the user specified output folder. After these messages are sent, they will not be removed. Immediately after a message has been sent, the crontab entry for this message will be removed.
On OSX Mojave, crontab jobs are not autmatically removed because of privilege limitations. You can manually edit your crontab file using crontab -e in a terminal.