Smops

Inspiration

As developers, our worst nightmare is getting a text that says:

You forgot to run bin webpack after you pushed, and now production is down!

while we are away from our computer. If only there was a way to run terminal commands on the go! With SMOPS, developers never have to worry about being away from their keyboard when they realize they need to run a command to save production. In short, we just wanted to make a project that would make our own lives as developers easier!

What it does

SMOPS allows users to send command line instructions to their server over text. If a developer wants to use SMOPS, they can simply download SMOPS onto their system, register with their Twillio credentials online, and get started sending terminal commands on the go!

How we built it

SMOPS has a React frontend paired with a Flask backend, and uses postgreSQL to store the user's credentials. We pair-programmed for most of the hackathon, pooling together our knowledge across the stack to build the final application.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into a lot of bugs while integrating React with Flask, particularly when trying to use react-router. Flask confused the react-router paths with API endpoints, but we took advantage of some boilerplate code into order to fix that bug and get everything working as expected.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of having a functional system that can actually communicate through SMS. Though it does not have the most advanced UI, we are also happy that we have a functional user UI to allow for quick management of the tool. Though integrating React and Flask was difficult, we were able to work together to fix the bugs we encountered. Finally, we are proud of building a tool that we ourselves would use!

What we learned

We learned how to use the Twilio SMS API. We also worked with Flask for the first time, and figured out how to integrate it with React.

What's next for Smops

We would like to increase the number of features available through SMS, such as adding system monitoring and notifications as well as execute bash scripts written through SMS. We also want to add MMS support. Finally, we also would have added support to other messaging apps (Facebook Messanger, Whatsapp, Telegram) with more time.