Africa’s Talking SMS Aggregator

As of v3.6.0, SMS messages can be sent and received using the Africa’s Talking service.

Africa’s Talking configuration

First, run openssl rand -hex 32 in your terminal to generate a long unique key that you will use as the cht-api-key.

Log on to the Africa’s Talking Dashboard and configure the two callback URLs as follows.

• Delivery Reports: https://<hostname>/api/v1/sms/africastalking/delivery-reports?key=<cht-api-key>
• Incoming Messages: https://<hostname>/api/v1/sms/africastalking/incoming-messages?key=<cht-api-key>

Next, in Africa’s Talking dashboard, generate an “API Key” that you will use as the at-api-key.

Next, save the at-api-key in your CHT Core configuration as covered below.

CHT Core configuration

API keys

The Africa’s Talking integration uses the CHT Credentials service to retrieve the API keys using the IDs africastalking.com:incoming and africastalking.com:outgoing.

Use the CHT credentials API to securely store the credentials by running the commands below.

• curl -X PUT -H "Content-Type: text/plain" https://<user>:<pass>@<hostname>/api/v1/credentials/africastalking.com:incoming -d 'cht-api-key'

• curl -X PUT -H "Content-Type: text/plain" https://<user>:<pass>@<hostname>/api/v1/credentials/africastalking.com:outgoing -d 'at-api-key'

App settings

Update your app settings as follows.

{
  "sms": {
    "outgoing_service": "africas-talking",
    "reply_to": "<africa's talking shortcode>",
    "africas_talking": {
      "username": "<africa's talking username>"
    }
  }
}

Testing

To test your integration, set your username to sandbox, log in to Africa’s Talking, and go to the Sandbox app.