Birthday App (bday-app)

Never Forget A Friend's Birthday with Python, Flask and Twilio

This app lets you:

import your Facebook birthday calendar,
send SMS notification messages of upcoming birthdays,
send text messages and simple ecards via SMS.

Setup instructions

Clone this repo:

 $ git clone https://github.com/pybites/bday-app

Make a virtual env and install dependencies:

 $ cd bday-app
 $ python3 -m venv venv
 $ source venv/bin/activate
 $ pip install -r requirements.txt

Create a Twilio account, get a phone number and API key (sid) and token.
Copy the settings template in place:
```
 $ cp env-example.conf env.conf
```
Update it with the correct settings:
- flask - secret = set this to a random, hard to guess string (see Flask docs)
- twilio_api - sid + token = obtained in step 3
- phones - twilio = obtained in step 3
- phones - admin = your (verified) mobile phone number, where you want to receive notification messages
- login - user + password = define your login credentials for the Flask app
- server - url = unchanged if running locally, update to base URL if deployed elsewhere (so far I only tested it on my localhost)

NOTE: make sure you use E.164 number formatting for phone numbers (e.g. +34666555444, +442071838750). See Twilio's support article: Formatting International Phone Numbers.

Import your FB calendar into local SQLite database with birthdays
- Export your birthday calendar from Facebook and save it as cal.ics in the app's toplevel directory.
- Run model.py to import the birthdays into the DB. Use it with -t if you want to strip out real names.
```
  $ python model.py
```

How to run it

This app has two parts:

The notifier which checks once a day for birthdays. If there are one or more birthdays that day it sends out an SMS to your configured admin phone. You need to run this as a background job so use nohup:
```
 $ nohup ./notify.py &
```
The front-end is a Flask app which you can invoke with:
```
 $ python app.py
```

Note that for both scripts you need to have your virtualenv enabled.

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