Sending SMS

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💬 Steps to start sending SMS

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Step 1. Raven Account Setup

If you have not signed up on Raven yet, please sign up for free.

You can either use the default App (<your-account-name_test>) created on sign up or create a new one by going to the Settings tab in the dashboard. To know more please check our platform doc on Apps. Collect your credentials (API Key and App ID) as you will need them in the API to trigger notifications.

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Step 2. Add an SMS Integration

An Integration is nothing but a provider like Twilio, MessageBird etc. You can add/remove any provider without having to manage their APIs. Head over to Integrations tab in the dashboard and select SMS. You will see a list of available SMS integrations as shown here:

At this point, you either would be using your own SMS providers or would be looking to add a new one.

Once you have added your Integration, you will be able to view it in the Live tab on the dashboard. You can always add/remove/update any integration without having to manage any code.

If you do not see the Integration you are looking for, please email us on support@ravenapp.dev, and we will add it to the list.

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Step 3. Create an Event

Events define - which notifications to send, what should the content be and how to send them. You can manage all this directly from the dashboard without having to write a single line of code. Check our platform doc on Events for more details.

To send an SMS, we need to first create an event with SMS enabled. In this event, we will add the message content and select the integration to send this SMS with (the integration we added in the previous step). Head over to Events tab in the dashboard and click on the Create Event button.

1. Give a unique name to this event. This name will be used to trigger the event in the Send Event API.
2. Select SMS as a channel to send notifications. Also, select the Integration that you added earlier in Step 2. If you are using multiple SMS Integrations, you can add one as a fallback. Select the “More Options” switch to add fallbacks.
3. Create the SMS template. You can add dynamic text to the template like user name, invoice number, order id etc., with the handlebar notation, like this {{user_name}} For more details on SMS templates, encoding, languages etc, please check our SMS Template doc.

Your event is created! You will be able to see it in the Events list now.

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Step 4. Trigger the Event

Trigger the Event Now we just need to test if our setup works. Trigger the event that you created above. You can either do this from the dashboard itself (Go to Events tab > Click on View Event Button (Eye) > Dialog opens > Click on Test Event). The other way is to hit the API directly with cURL or Postman. Below is how the API will look like -

curl 'https://api.ravenapp.dev/v1/apps/{{APP_ID}}/events/send' \
-H 'Authorization: AuthKey {{API_KEY}}' \
-H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
--data-raw '{
    "event": "<YOUR_EVENT_NAME>",
    "user": {
        "mobile": "<MOBILE_NO>"
    },
    "data": {
        "user_name": "John Doe"
    }
}'

Copy the cURL request and simply hit enter in your terminal.

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Step 5. Verify in Logs

As a final step, we can verify if everything went well and the notification was sent. Raven provides a single view of all logs across all channels. You can view the request payload, the response and the status of the notification sent. You can check our platform doc on Logs & Metrics for more details.

Head over to in the Logs tab dashboard and click on View icon of the first log entry. You will be able to see the details of the payload and the status of the notification that you sent.