Decorators

One of the key features of django-twilio is making it easy to build Django views that return TwiML instructions back to Twilio, without having to deal with all the complex security issues.

All-In-One Decorator

The most useful decorator that ships with django-twilio is twilio_view, which will make your life much easier.

The django_twilio.decorators.twilio_view decorator:

  1. Protects your views against forgery, and ensures that the request which hits your view originated from Twilio’s servers. This way, you don’t have to worry about fake requests hitting your views that may cause you to launch calls, or waste any money on fraudulent activity.

  2. Ensures your view is CSRF exempt. Since Twilio will always POST data to your views, you’d normally have to explicitly declare your view CSRF exempt. The decorator does this automatically.

  3. Enforces a blacklist. If you’ve got any django_twilio.models.Caller objects who are blacklisted, any service requests from them will be rejected.

    Note

    You can manage your blacklist via the Django admin panel (if you have it enabled). django-twilio provides a Caller admin hook that allows you to create new callers, and blacklist them if you wish.

  4. Allows you to (optionally) return raw TwiML responses without building an HttpResponse object. This can save a lot of redundant typing.

Example usage

Let’s take a look at an example:

from twilio.twiml.messaging_response import MessagingResponse
from django_twilio.decorators import twilio_view

@twilio_view
def reply_to_sms_messages(request):
    r = MessagingResponse()
    r.message('Thanks for the SMS message!')
    return r

In the example above, we built a view that Twilio can POST data to, and that will instruct Twilio to send a SMS message back to the person who messaged us saying, “Thanks for the SMS message!”.

Class based view example

Here’s the same thing as above, using a class-based view:

from twilio.twiml.messaging_response import MessagingResponse

from django.views.generic import View
from django.utils.decorators import method_decorator

from django_twilio.decorators import twilio_view

class ThanksView(View):

    @method_decorator(twilio_view)
    def dispatch(self, request, *args, **kwargs):
        return super(ResponseView, self).dispatch(request, *args, **kwargs)

    def post(self, request):
        r = MessagingResponse()
        r.message('Thanks for the SMS message!')
        return r

How Forgery Protection Works

Forgery protection is extremely important when writing Twilio code. Since your code will be doing stuff that costs money (sending calls, SMS messages, etc.), ensuring all incoming HTTP requests actually originate from Twilio is really important.

The way django-twilio implements forgery protection is by checking for a specific flag in the django configuration settings:

DJANGO_TWILIO_FORGERY_PROTECTION = False

If this setting is not present, it will default to the opposite of settings.DEBUG; in debug mode, forgery protection will be off.

This behavior has been specifically implemented this way so that, while in development mode, you can:

  • Unit test your Twilio views without getting permission denied errors.
  • Test your views out locally and make sure they return the code you want.

Because of this, it is extremely important that when your site goes live, you ensure that settings.DEBUG = False and DJANGO_TWILIO_FORGERY_PROTECTION = True.