Send & receive sms

Membrane includes an sms program—installed in your workspace by default—for sending and receiving text messages programmatically.

Note

You can only configure one phone number at the moment (to send texts to yourself), but we plan to remove that limitation. Send us a note if that’s something you’d like asap, and/or upvote it on our public roadmap.

Configure

To configure your sms program, find the sms program in the Membrane Navigator, click the configure action, type in your phone number, and hit Invoke.

Send

To send yourself a text manually, click on the sms program in the Membrane Navigator, click the send action, type in a message, and hit Invoke. Check your phone! (And Membrane Logs 👀).

To send yourself a text programmatically, add the sms program as a connection to any program and call nodes.sms.send({ message: "[whatever]" }).

Receive

Try responding to the text you sent yourself above, and check the sms Logs for your text.

When sms receives a text, it fires a received event that other Membrane programs can subscribe to. We created an sms-subscriber program as a minimal example of how to do this.

import { state, nodes, root } from "membrane";

state.messages ??= [];

/**
 * This action subscribes to the `sms.received` event.
 * Invoke it to set up the subscription.
 */
export async function listenSms() {
  await nodes.sms.received.$subscribe(root.readSms);
}

/**
 * This action is the handler for `sms.received` events.
 * When you text Membrane, you'll see the `received` event in Logs.
 */
export async function readSms(_, { event }) {
  const received = event.message;
  state.messages.push(received);
  // TODO: do something cool!
}