Getting Started and Setup

Below are the basic steps need to get rapidsms-multimodem integrated into your RapidSMS project.

MultiModem Setup

Log into the MultiModem Web Management system and:

• Enable HTTP API Status under SMS Services (top nav) > SMS API (sidebar nav) > HTTP API Configuration. Make sure you click Save.

• Add a new SMS user under SMS Services (top nav) > Users (sidebar nav).

• Enable Non Polling Receive API Status under SMS Services (top nav) > SMS API (sidebar nav) > Non Polling Receive API Configuration. Once saved, fill in the following fields:

  • Server: Server URI or hosname. For local development, this will most likely just be your IP address, e.g. 192.168.1.100.
  • Port: Either 8000 for local development or 80 for production.
  • Server Default Page: You backend URL as defined below, e.g. backend/multimodem/isms-lebanon/

RapidSMS Setup

Install rapidsms-multimodem:

pip install rapidsms-multimodem

Add rapidsms_multimodem to your INSTALLED_APPS in your settings.py file:

INSTALLED_APPS = (
    # other apps
    'rapidsms_multimodem',
)

Add the following to your existing INSTALLED_BACKENDS configuration in your settings.py file:

INSTALLED_BACKENDS = {
    # ...
    # other backends, if any
    "isms-lebanon-1": {
        "ENGINE":  "rapidsms_multimodem.outgoing.MultiModemBackend",
        "sendsms_url": "http://<multimodem-ip-address>:81/sendmsg",
        "sendsms_user": "<username>",
        "sendsms_pass": "<password>",
        "modem_port": 1,
        "server_slug": "isms-lebanon",
    },
}

Single port modems only have 1 port, but it should still be specified.

The server_slug parameter serves 2 purposes. It uniquely identifies the iSMS server, so that RapidSMS doesn’t get confused by 2 different servers having the same port number (since those are restricted to be integers from 1 to 8). It’s also used to create the RapidSMS URL to which the iSMS server will send messages.

Next, you need to add an endpoint to your urls.py for the newly created backend. You can do this like so:

from django.conf.urls import url
from rapidsms_multimodem.views import receive_multimodem_message

urlpatterns = [
    url(r"^backend/multimodem/(?P<server_slug>[\w_-]+)/$",
        receive_multimodem_message, name='multimodem-backend'),
]

Now inbound MultiModem messages can be received at <your-server>/backend/multimodem/isms-lebanon/ and outbound messages will be sent via the MultiModem backend.

Additional modems on the same iSMS server will need additional entries in INSTALLED_BACKENDS. The only parameter that will be different than above will be the modem_port.

If you have more than one iSMS server, you’ll create additional entries in INSTALLED_BACKENDS, making sure that server_slug is unique for each iSMS server. You will NOT need to add additional patterns to urls.py. The regular expression will catch the server_slug and match messages to the proper backend.