I am using Twilio to send and receive SMS messages from a Python application. The issue is that their tutorials use ngrok as a way to get through the firewall but I don't want to have to run ngrok every time I run my app and the URL changes every time ngrok runs so I have to change the webhook url on Twilio every time. Is there a better way around this? Is this something that requires a server?
There are two options that you have.
The paid option of ngrok allows you to set a persistent url so that you don't have to chance the webhook url on Twilio each time.
If you have a server, then you would also be able to set a persistent url to your server.
Unfortunately, the free version of ngrok does not allow you to set a persistent url.
You can look at going Serverless with Twilio Functions (Node.js/JavaScript).
Building Apps with Twilio Functions
https://support.twilio.com/hc/en-us/articles/115007737928-Building-apps-with-Twilio-Functions
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As far as I know, this question hasn't really been asked.
I want to use twilio to send and receive messages from a python app. Sending isn't a problem, but I know receiving uses webhooks. Every tutorial and even the twilio documentation uses flask. Im wondering if I can create a program to receive information from twilio without using flask or is flask/django required.
Thanks
You need something that can accept HTTP requests
Webhooks are user-defined HTTP callbacks. They are usually triggered by some event, such as receiving an SMS message or an incoming phone call. When that event occurs, Twilio makes an HTTP request (usually a POST or a GET) to the URL configured for the webhook.
To handle a webhook, you only need to build a small web application that can accept the HTTP requests.
It needs to be something that Twilio can access through HTTP. So while you can probably use any web framework you want, you are going to need one.
https://www.twilio.com/docs/sms/tutorials/how-to-receive-and-reply-python
If I develop a REST service hosted in Apache and a Python plugin which services GET, PUT, DELETE, PATCH; and this service is consumed by an Angular client (or other REST interacting browser technology). Then how do I make it scale-able with RabbitMQ (AMQP)?
Potential Solution #1
Multiple Apache's still faces off against the browser's HTTP calls.
Each Apache instance uses an AMQP plugin and then posts message to a queue
Python microservices monitor a queue and pull a message, service it and return response
Response passed back to Apache plugin, in turn Apache generates the HTTP response
Does this mean the Python microservice no longer has any HTTP server code at all. This will change that component a lot. Perhaps best to decide upfront if you want to use this pattern as it seems it would be a task to rip out any HTTP server code.
Other potential solutions? I am genuinely puzzled as to how we're supposed to take a classic REST server component and upgrade it to be scale-able with RabbitMQ/AMQP with minimal disruption.
I would recommend switching wsgi to asgi(nginx can help here), Im not sure why you think rabbitmq is the solution to your problem, as nothing you described seems like that would be solved by using this method.
asgi is not supported by apache as far as I know, but it allows the server to go do work, and while its working it can continue to service new requests that come in. (gross over simplification)
If for whatever reason you really want to use job workers (rabbitmq, etc) then I would suggest returning to the user a "token" (really just the job_id) and then they can call with that token, and it will report back either the current job status or the result
I am tasked with building a Slack slash command app in Python which will respond to incoming slash commands. However, for security reasons, I am not allowed to open the firewall for incoming webhooks from Slack. Is there instead a way to check a queue of sent slash commands?
For example, a user types "/myslashapp" in a specific channel. My app will need to do something like call an endpoint every 30 seconds and check if the "/myslashapp" command was sent. If it was, my app should trigger a Lambda function in AWS.
Based on reading the Slack API docs, I haven't found any way to do this other than perhaps the RTM API, though it seems like overkill and still requires an open socket.
No. The Slack API has no build-in support that allows you to pull requests after-the-fact from a queue instead of receiving them from Slack when they happen.
The RTM API might work for you, because the connection to Slack is initiated from your side. So - provided you firewall allows it - would also work from within an intranet. However, you can not do slash commands with the RTM API or any of the other interesting interactive Slack features like buttons. Only simple messages and events.
You could implement your own bridging solution and pull from it. But I don't think that a pulling solution would work, because it creates a lot of latency for your app. Users expect an immediate response to their slash command, not a delay of 30 secs or more.
So in summary I think you only have two valid options:
Host your app internally and use a secure VPN like ngrok to expose a public URL to your app.
Run your app on the Internet and let it have a secure connection to your Intranet for accessing internal data. (similar to e.g. a shopping web site would work, that has a public app on the Internet, but also can transmit orders to the business applications on the companies Intranet.)
I'm trying to create a Slack App (see here), but I'm having incredible difficulty with how to create a Redirect URI.
Slack states the following:
You must specify at least one redirect URL for OAuth to work. If you
pass a URL in an OAuth request, it must (at least partially) match one
of the URLs you enter here. Learn more
I have a rudimentary understanding of a Redirect URI conceptually, but I have no idea how to go about actually getting this Redirect URI that Slack requires.
I've successfully used all of Slacks Integrations with Python including Real Time Messaging, but setting up a Redirect URI seems to require a special server or a website.
As already mentioned in the comments you will need a publicly reachable webserver to host your script for installing the Slack app. So the redirect URL is the URL to your installation script.
Basically any webserver or script hosting service that runs your favorite script flavor (e.g. PHP or Python) will work. See also this answer on how the OAUTH process can be implemented.
The redirect URL works without SSL, but for security reasons SSL is strongly recommended. Also many other features of Slack requires you to run SSL on your webserver (e.g. Interactive Buttons)
Another option is to run a webserver on your local machine (e.g. WAMP for windows) and open it to the Internet through a secure tunnel (e.g. ngrok). For developing and testing this is actually the better alternative, since you can test and fix your Slack app locally without having to deploy every change on a public server.
However for running a public Slack app (e.g. one that is listed on the Slack App Directory) I would strongly recommend to put the production version of your App on a public webserver.
If you're just trying to get it up so that you can authorize another workspace you can always use 'http://localhost' after authorizing it will try to redirect you there and you wont be able to see anything useful, but the authorization should still have taken place I believe.
of course if you're looking for the api code, you will have to pull it directly from the browser url. ... it's very manual.
I have been trying to do something which I think should be pretty simple. The situation is as follows. The client makes a request for a resource on my web server. My flask application processes the request and determines that this resource is located at a certain location on another web server and the client should make a request of that server instead.
I know I can use the redirect function to tell the client to send a request to the remote location, but my problem is that the remote location is the Amazon Glacier servers. These servers require a request to be made in a certain way, with a special signature (see http://docs.aws.amazon.com/amazonglacier/latest/dev/amazon-glacier-signing-requests.html). My flask application knows how to go about the business of making these requests in the required way. I essentially want to know if it's possible to send a response to my client saying, send this request (generated by my application, with all the required signing) to the Amazon server?
Any ideas?
If the request can be encoded with get params like
http://www.redirecturl.com/?param1=bla¶m2=blub
then it should work no problem. Just construct the request as a string and pass it to redirect().
As far as i know, you can't tell a client to send specific headers to a HTTP redirect URL.
Hitting the Glacier URL serverside would be the easiest. Using javascript on the clientside would only work if Glacier is implementing CORS.