Lucius is a Concerige for human diasters. A Twilio-based IVR and "Deadman's" switch and recovery system for at-risk humans
For example, you can ask lucius to call you once every N days. If you don't acknolwedge the call with your cdoe, lucius can call other people and deliver your message to a contact list of humans.
Maybe you're an at-risk individual, journalist or other person. Maybe you only get one phone call.
What do you do? Call Lucius and get connected to your contact list.
Can't make any calls? Let Lucius deal with it for youl
Lucius will keep trying until someone picks up.
This thing runs under venv but to save space we don't check in the venv.
From the top-level directory, generate a new virtual environment and activate it.
python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
pip install --upgrade pip # if need be
From there, we can start the server.
cd lucius
python manage.py migrate --run-syncdb
python manage.py createsuperuser
python manage.py runserver
If you need to get out of the virtual environment, type deactivate or just close the Terminal window.
In another window, let's get ngrok running.
As this entire service depends on Twilio, we need a way to connect Twilio to your
dev instance. For this we're going to just ngrok.
Install ngrok from https://ngrok.com/
Sign up on their site and get an authtoken. (see https://dashboard.ngrok.com/get-started/setup)
I like to install ngrok in my ~/bin folder and then add export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/bin to my .profile. How you handle this install is up to you.
Then you can do ngrok http 8000 in a new window, and ngrok will start forwarding.
After you've purchased a phone number from Twilio, you need to connect the Voice and Messaging services to ngrok.
Click on the phone number in Twilio, Click on Voice & Fax, and set the following options in Twilio.
"A call comes in: Webhook" to be https://XXXXXX.ngrok.io/inbound/answer
"A message comes in: Webhook" to be https://XXXXXX.ngrok.io/inbound/sms
Both options should be using HTTP POST.
The ngrok.io address should match whatever ngrok has assigned to you.
Do not worry about any of the other settings for now.
Going to https://XXX.ngrok.io/ should get you to the login page if all is working correctly, and https://XXX.ngrok.io/inbound/answer should get you the 1st page of TwiML, for the voice IVR. That page should come back something like:
<Response>
<Say>I am Lucius. Here to help.</Say>
<Gather action="/login/" input="dtmf speech" speechTimeout="auto" timeout="10">
<Say>Please enter or say your PIN</Say>
</Gather>
<Say>I did not receive your selection. Try Again.</Say>
<Pause length="1"/>
<Redirect/>
</Response>
By default lucius uses a sqlite database. You are welcome to move Django over to use Postgres, MySQL, or any other supported database backend. There's hundreds of tutorials out there for doing so, and this one is decent: https://www.enterprisedb.com/postgres-tutorials/how-use-postgresql-django
In a production site you should enable SECURE_SSL_REDIRECT = True in settings.py and force users to use HTTPS. Enabling this with ngrok creates an infinite 301 redirect loop.
Unfortunately when using ngrok trying to have HTTPS redirects working is very hard right now, I haven't figured this out (yet) and will come up with a solution at some point.
- User registration w/ proper profile update
- Account assignment with PIN login / development
- Add Contact
- List Contact
- Remove Contacts
- Call out / monitor daemon / retry
- IVR outbound