Magic Fingers

Magic Fingers

Connect SMS Messages to IFTTT

This application scans incoming SMS messages from your Twilio number for keywords (commands). You can set any keywords. Each command is mapped to an IFTTT Maker channel event and triggers a IFTTT recipe. By using Twilio directly, you can avoid some of the SMS channel limitations on IFTTT (such as the cost of the SMS messages if you’re outside the US).

Who is it For?

Anybody really, but I am quadriplegic and we developed this so I could call for help, especially in the middle of the night. Using Magic Fingers I can use the voice recognition on my smartphone to text message my smart lightbulbs and flash them different colours (blue for assistance, red for emergency help, etc). In this way I can signal carers or family immediately, wherever they are in the house, without yelling for ages. It’s obviously highly adaptable and extensible, however, and can be used to “press” many kinds of “button” / trigger many kinds of actions.

Before You Begin

To make use of this application, you will need a Twilio account and some IFTTT Maker events set up to do some useful tasks on your behalf. From these accounts, you will need:

Configuring the application

Open commands.js to find a JavaScript file which maps command words (the keys of the exported JavaScript object) to corresponding IFTTT events (the values of the JavaScript object). Here is an example commands.js which maps the SMS keyword/command “pizza” to the IFTTT event “order_me_a_pizza”.

'use strict';

module.exports = {
  pizza: 'order_me_a_pizza',

Deploying the Application

No matter how or where you deploy this application, you’ll need to configure a few environment variables.

Variable Name Description
IFTTT_KEY The secret key for your IFTTT account
TWILIO_AUTH_TOKEN A secret key from your Twilio account, found at Required for securing the SMS feature in production.
NODE_ENV Indicates whether the application is in development or production mode - when deploying the app for usage, should be set to production. If you are hacking on the app locally, it can be omitted.
PRODUCTION_URL The full URL of the Twilio SMS webhook (more on this later). An example URL for a Heroku-hosted app would be
PORT Used to configure a port for the HTTP server. This is provided automatically on Heroku, and is defaulted to 3000 if not provided.

Fastest Option - Heroku Button

The fastest way to deploy this Node.js application is to use Heroku - click the button below to deploy this application using your own Heroku account.


Enter in the environment variable values for your application in the provided form.

Fast option - Heroku Deployment

If you’d prefer to deploy this app to Heroku from the command line, you’ll need the Heroku CLI installed.

Clone this repository, and enter its directory on your computer. Initialize the app on your Heroku account with the following commands:

heroku create
git push heroku master

This will create a new app for you on Heroku. Next, you will need to use the CLI to add all your environment variables to the Heroku environment. Note the Heroku app URL that was created for you in the previous step, and use that in the PRODUCTION_URL setting. Make sure the URL ends with the /sms path.

heroku config:add IFTTT_KEY=your_key \
    TWILIO_AUTH_TOKEN=your_token \
    NODE_ENV=production \

This will set four environment variables and restart your Heroku application.

Self-Hosted Option

You can also deploy this code on your own server. Instructions for deploying a Node.js application on an Ubuntu Digital Ocean VPS can be found here.

In this case, you will need to manually set all the environment variables listed above.

Configuring Twilio

Next, you will need to configure a Twilio phone number to work with the application we just deployed. In the Twilio console, purchase an SMS-capable phone number to use with this application, or configure a number you already own.

If you search for a number to buy, make sure it is SMS-capable.

buy an SMS capable number

After you buy a number, you will be able to configure a webhook that will execute code on a server whenever your Twilio number receives an incoming SMS message. Let’s change our SMS webhook URL to use our new web app’s URL. If you deployed to Heroku, this would be

Configure webhook URL

Make sure to save after setting this option!

Testing the Application

Once things are all set up, you can test the application by sending an SMS to your Twilio number containing one or many of the commands you configured in commands.js. If for example you texted your number “pizza plz”, and pizza was one of the keywords in commands.js as in the example above, the order_me_a_pizza event would be sent to IFTTT.