Get Started with PHP

Sign up for a Plivo Account

When you sign up with Plivo, you will start with a free trial account to experiment with and learn about our services. This free trial account comes with free credits. If you wish to continue with our service, you can add more credits and purchase a number by clicking here. Add a number and credits to your account to start testing the full range of our voice and SMS service features.

Sign up here to get your free Plivo account today.

Follow these steps to successfully sign up for a free trial account:

1. Sign up with your work email address
2. Check your inbox for an activation email from Plivo. Click on the link in the email to activate your account.
3. Enter your mobile number to complete the phone verification step.

Sign up with your work email address

If you have any issues creating a Plivo account, please reach out to our Support Team for assistance.

Install PHP and the Plivo PHP Server SDK

You must set up and install PHP and Plivo’s PHP SDK to make your first call. Here’s how.

Install PHP

Install Composer

Composer is a dependency manager for PHP that is used in all modern PHP frameworks, such as Symfony and Laravel. We highly recommend using Composer as the package manager for your web project.

Install Plivo PHP Package

• Create a project directory, run the following command:

  $ mkdir myphpapp
  

• Change the directory to our project directory in the command line:

  $ cd myphpapp
  

• To install the stable release, run the following command in the project directory:

  $ composer require plivo/plivo-php
  

• To install a specific release, run the following command in the project directory:

  $ composer require plivo/plivo-php:4.3.1
  

• To test the features in the beta release, run the following command in the project directory:

  $ composer require plivo/plivo-php:v4.2-beta1
  

• Alternatively, you can download this source and run

  $ composer install
  

This generates the autoload files, which you can include using the following line in your PHP source code to start using the SDK.

<?php
require 'vendor/autoload.php'

Make your first Outbound Call

Prerequisites

This section will guide you through how to use Plivo APIs to make voice calls from your application. First, let’s make sure you meet these prerequisites before we dive into the code.

• Plivo Auth Id and Auth Token: You will find your Plivo Auth Id and Auth Token on the home screen of your Plivo Console. Click here to sign-up for a Plivo account if you haven’t already!

  

• Plivo Phone Number(Optional): You can purchase numbers from the Numbers section of your Plivo Console and use the same as the caller ID for the outbound call. This number will also help you receive incoming calls as you must have a voice-enabled Plivo phone number to do the same. Please note that you can also purchase numbers using the Numbers API.

  

• Answer Url: When a call is answered by the destination_number, you can control the call flow with the help of the answer_url set in the API request. Plivo will invoke the answer_url specified as soon as the call is answered and expect a valid XML response with instructions to handle the call. For example, you can use https://s3.amazonaws.com/static.plivo.com/answer.xml as answer_url to test your first outgoing call. The XML response of this is:

  <Response>
  <Speak>Congratulations! You've made your first outbound call!</Speak>
  </Response>
  

  As you can tell, the XML above holds instructions to say ‘Congratulations! You’ve made your first outbound call!’ to the callee. You can find the entire list of Plivo XML verbs and their details in the XML Reference section of the website here.

Now, create a file called MakeCall.php and paste the following code:

Code

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<?php
require 'vendor/autoload.php';
use Plivo\RestClient;

$auth_id    = "Your AUTH_ID";
$auth_token = "Your AUTH_TOKEN";
$p          = new RestClient($auth_id, $auth_token);

$response = $client->calls->create('the_callerID',
                                 ['the_destination_number'],
                                 'http://s3.amazonaws.com/static.plivo.com/answer.xml',
                                 'GET');
print_r($response);

Save the file and use the following command to run your code.

php MakeCall.php

Receive Your First Inbound Call

Prerequisites

In addition to having at least one voice-enabled Plivo phone number that is needed to receive incoming calls (as was mentioned earlier), you need the following:

Answer URL & Callback URLs

When a call is received on a Plivo voice-enabled number, you can control the call flow by declaring an answer URL for your Plivo application associated with that Plivo phone number. Plivo will invoke the answer URL specified and expect a valid XML response to handle the call.

Notice how the concept of Answer URLs applies to both outbound API calls as well as incoming calls to your Plivo numbers. In the outbound API call example above, we specified the answer URL along with the make call API request, whereas in the case of incoming calls to Plivo numbers, the answer URL is specified in the Plivo application associated with the phone number.

In addition to requests to the answer URL, Plivo initiates HTTP requests to your application server through the course of a call based on the specific XML elements in your answer XML. Such requests can be broadly classified into two categories:

Action URL requests: XML instructions to carry forward the call are expected in response to these requests. These requests are typically invoked at the end of an XML element’s execution. For example: when an IVR input is received from the caller during a GetInput XML execution.

Callback URL requests: No XML instructions are expected in response to these requests. Such requests serve as webhooks to notify your application server of important events through the course of an XML element’s execution. For example: when a conference participant is muted or unmuted.

Web Server

To be able to host Answer and Callback URLs and to be able to provide valid XMLs and accept notifications on these URLs respectively, you need to host a webserver at your end.

Set up PHP server for Incoming Calls & Callbacks.

In this section, we’ll walk you through how to set up a PHP server in under five minutes and start handling incoming calls & callbacks.

Use the following code snippet to start a local server.

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<?php
    require '../vendor/autoload.php';
    use Plivo\XML\Response;

    $response = new Response();
    $speak_body = "Hello, you just received your first call";
    $response->addSpeak($speak_body);

    Header('Content-type: text/xml');
    echo($response->toXML());
?>

Save this code in any file (name the file something like receive_call.php). To run this file on the server, go to the folder where this file resides and use the following command:

php -S localhost:8000

You can choose to run it on any other IP or port that your machine has access to. You should see your basic server app in action on http://localhost:8000/receive_call.php

Exposing your local server to the internet

To receive incoming calls and to handle callbacks, your local server should be able to connect with the Plivo API service. Ngrok is a tunneling software used to expose a web server running on your local machine to the internet. Using Ngrok you can set webhooks that can talk to the Plivo server.

You can download and install ngrok from here. Follow the detailed configuration instructions to get started.

Run ngrok on the port which currently hosts your application. For example, if your port number is 80, run the following command:

./ngrok http <port_on_which_your_local_server_is_running>

This will give you a UI with links that look like ngrok.io/* which you can use to access your local server using the public network.

Create an Application

1. Create an Application by visiting the Application Page and clicking on New Application. You can also use Plivo’s Application API.
2. Give your application a name. Let’s call it Receive_call. Enter your server URL (e.g. http://example.com/receive_call.php) in the Answer URL field and set the method as POST. See our Application API docs to learn how to modify your application through our APIs.
3. Click on Create to save your application.

Assign a Plivo number to your app

1. Navigate to the Numbers page and select the phone number you want to use for this app.
2. Select Receive Call (name of the app) from the Plivo App dropdown list.
3. Click on Update to save.

Test and validate

Make a call to your Plivo number using a regular mobile phone. Plivo will send a request to your Answer URL requesting for a valid XML response and process the call. Meanwhile, the parameters listed in the XML Request - call status documentation will also be sent to your server.

Forward an Incoming call

To forward an incoming call, you need to use Dial XML.

• You should set up the dial XML document in your server
• URL of the dial XML in your server has to be set up as the answer_url of the app assigned to the Plivo number.
• During an incoming call to your Plivo number, Plivo will send a request to the answer_url expecting a valid XML to process the incoming call.
• As the response would be a dial XML, the call will be forwarded to the number defined in the XML response.

Create a file called forward_call.php and paste the below code.

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<?php
    require '../vendor/autoload.php';
    use Plivo\XML\Response;

    $response = new Response();

    $params = array(
        'action' => "https://www.foo.com/dial_status/",
        'method' => "POST",
        'redirect' => "true"
    );

    $dial = $response->addDial($params);
    $number = "14153336666";  // call wll be forwarded to this number
    $dial->addNumber($number);

    Header('Content-type: text/xml');
    echo($response->toXML());

Test and validate

Make a call to your Plivo number using a regular mobile phone. Plivo will send a request to your Answer URL requesting for a valid XML response and process the call. Once Plivo receives the dial XML response, the call will be forwarded to the number defined in the XML. Meanwhile, the parameters listed in the XML Request - call status documentation will also be sent to your server.