This is SlingshotSMS, a minimal SMS server which connects GSM modems to websites and applications via a simple HTTP interface.

Requirements

• Python 2.5 or newer
• cherrypy, sqlobject, pySerial, PyRSS2Gen
• AT-compatible GSM modem
• This project uses pygsm, sponsored by UNICEF. A version of pygsm is included.

Modem Compatibility

• pygsm's wiki
• http://code.google.com/p/smslib/wiki/Compatibility

Running SlingshotSMS

Running on Mac

There are two main options:

• To open SlingshotSMS in a terminal, double-click on SlingshotSMS.command
• To open SlingshotSMS as an application, double-click on the SlingshotSMS application icon. If this doesn't boot up, open Console (under System Utilities) to see SlingshotSMS debugging messages

Running on Windows

• Double-click on slingshotsms.exe

Running Manually

terminal:

python slingshotsms.py

Manual Installation

• Install required libraries
• Drop into directory
• Edit slingshotsms.txt
• run python slingshotsms.py

Building

Building on Windows

In cmd.exe:

C:\Python25\python.exe setup.py py2exe

Building on Mac

In terminal.app:

make buildmac

This Makefile corrects several flaws in the Python packaging workflow:

• py2app excludes are ineffective with Frameworks
• The docutils recipe for py2app is not actually working for serious use, because docutils was not written for any degree of portability
• iconfile is only a command-line option, rather than an option that can be set in setup.py

HTTP Methods

• /send

  Accepts POST data with keys "message" and "number" and immediately dispatches messages to the modem

• /status (Returns a multi-line status string)

• /list (returns a list of received messages as JSON)

Server Authentication

With version 2.0, SlingshotSMS introduced a system of key-based authentication similar to Flickr and Amazon Web Services implementations. The default setup is with a Drupal website using the Services Module and a feature customized to receive messages. Configuration for this system is in the [server] section of the configuration file slingshotsms.txt. A sample configuration might look like

server section:

endpoint=http://localhost/~tmcw/services-6--1/?q=/services/xmlrpc
key=57e3ec004e7b5bfe2e5aeaea0314c3d1
domain=localhost
node=3

In which node= refers to the node id of the feed object.

Older POST-based message sending is no longer supported because this method is more secure.

Sending a Message

Python:

>>> params = urllib.urlencode({'message': 'Hello, world', 'number': 19737144557})
>>> urllib.urlopen('http://127.0.0.1:8080/send', params).read()

PHP:

if (function_exists('curl_init')) {
  $request = curl_init();
  $headers[] = 'User-Agent: YourApp (+http://yourapp.com/)';
  curl_setopt($request, CURLOPT_URL, $endpoint);
  curl_setopt($request, CURLOPT_POST, TRUE);
  curl_setopt($request, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $params);
  curl_setopt($request, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, TRUE);
  curl_setopt($request, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, $headers);
  curl_setopt($request, CURLOPT_HEADER, TRUE);
  $data = curl_exec($request);
  $header_size = curl_getinfo($request, CURLINFO_HEADER_SIZE);
  curl_close ($request);
  return substr($data, $header_size);
}

Configuration

• mock=yes

  will run sms_server without trying to connect to a server, to test applications on the ability to POST and receive POST data

• sms_poll

  is the wait time between asking the modem for new messages database_file can specify what file the database will be on. Since this uses sqlObject, the database engine itself is flexible, but thread safety is a concern because the poller runs on a separate thread from the web server

Troubleshooting

• running this server from the command line with python slingshotsms.py Will give a log of modem messages. CMS ERROR: 515 indicates that the modem has not connected yet

Roadmap

• Unit tests + better test runners