This is the third article in a series of "Getting Started with Vonage Voice APIs and Ruby on Rails" tutorials. It continues the "Getting Started with Vonage and Ruby on Rails" series.
In the previous article, you learned how to set up a Rails application to be publicly accessible by Vonage and then receive a Call Event Update for a call in progress. In this article, you will learn how to receive an inbound call by implementing a similar webhook endpoint in Ruby on Rails.
View the source code on GitHub.
To follow this tutorial, you need to have:
A basic understanding of Ruby and Rails
Rails installed on your machine
NPM installed for the purpose of our CLI
Followed our previous tutorial on receiving call event updates with Ruby on Rails
To complete this tutorial, you will need a Vonage API account. If you don’t have one already, you can sign up today and start building with free credit. Once you have an account, you can find your API Key and API Secret at the top of the Vonage API Dashboard.
When someone calls the Vonage number that was purchased in the first tutorial, it will be received by Vonage. We will then make an HTTP call to the answer_url for the Vonage Application associated with that number.
To receive this webhook, you will need to set up a webhook endpoint and tell Vonage where to find it. For a refresher on how to set up ngrok for your application, read our post on connecting your local development server to the Vonage API using an ngrok tunnel.
The first step is to use the Vonage CLI tool to link the Vonage Application created in the previous tutorial to the purchased Nexmo number. We pass in the phone number and the application's UUID.
$ vonage apps:link aaaaaaaa-bbbb-cccc-dddd-0123456789ab --number=14155550102
This command tells Vonage to make an HTTP call to the answer_url of the Vonage Application every time the Vonage Number receives an inbound call. We already set the answer_url in the first tutorial of this series, but if you need to update it you can do so as follows:
$ vonage apps:update aaaaaaaa-bbbb-cccc-dddd-0123456789ab --name="My Voice App" --voice_answer_url=http://abc123.ngrok.io/inbound_calls --voice_event_url=http://abc123.ngrok.io/call_events --voice_answer_http=POST --voice_event_http=POST Application updated
The hard part is really done at this point. When a call comes in on your Vonage number, Vonage will notify your application by sending a webhook to the answer_url. A typical payload for this webhook will look something like this:
{
"from": "14155550104",
"to": "14155550102",
"conversation_uuid": "CON-aaaaaaaa-bbbb-cccc-dddd-0123456789ab",
}In this payload, the sending conversation is identified by the conversation_uuid parameter, and the from and to specify the caller and the Vonage number called. Let's add a new controller to process this payload and store a new call record.
# config/routes.rb
Rails.application.routes.draw do
resources :inbound_calls, only: [:create]
end
# app/controllers/inbound_calls_controller.rb
class InboundCallsController < ApplicationController
# We disable CSRF for this webhook call
skip_before_action :verify_authenticity_token
def create
Call.where(conversation_uuid: params[:conversation_uuid])
.first_or_create
.update_attributes(
to: params[:to],
from: params[:from]
)
render json: [
{
action: 'talk',
voiceName: 'Jennifer',
text: 'Hello, thank you for calling. This is Jennifer from Vonage. Ciao.'
}
]
end
endAlthough storing and updating the call details is not really necessary, it's useful to keep track of current call statuses, durations, and any other information that might benefit your application. This action returns a new Vonage Call Control Object (NCCO) that will play back a simple voice message to the recipient as specified. There are many more actions you can specify in the NCCO—have a play with them if you want.
OK, now start your server, ensure you have something like ngrok running, and make a voice call to your Vonage number! Can you hear Jennifer?
That's it for this tutorial. We've completed all the steps for receiving an inbound call in Ruby on Rails:
set up our Rails application to receive an inbound voice call webhook
informed Vonage of where to find our server
processed an incoming webhook
provided instructions to Vonage to play back a message
You can view the code used in this tutorial on GitHub.
That's it for this series on Ruby on Rails tutorials for now. As a reminder, you can see the source code for all of the SMS and Voice tutorials in our Ruby on Rails Quickstart repo.
