/Plivo-2FA-App

Plivo 2 Factor Authentication SMS App

Primary LanguageCSS

Plivo 2 Factor Authentication (2FA) App

tl;dr

Click the button below to deploy the Plivo 2FA app directly to your heroku account:

Deploy

About

This example shows how Plivo APIs can be used to integrate a two factor authentication system into your own web application. This example is built in Python using Flask application framework but the concept behind it language agnostic. So, be it Python, PHP, Ruby or Node, the concept remains the same.

The next section explains how the application works and in-turn how Plivo as a platform works. There is a separate section on deployment which explains how to deploy this application on Heroku.

How to use it

Here is a live demo of this sample application where you can try out how it works. This application verifies your phone number using the two factor authentication system. In the application, enter your phone number in E.164 format and click on 'Send Verification Code'. This sends an SMS to that number with a random security code in it. The application now shows a text box to enter this code to verify your mobile number. Once you get the code in the SMS, enter the code in the text box and click 'Check'. This will tell you whether the code you entered is correct or not. If you enter the correct code, then the application knows that the phone number belongs to you and thus the number is verified.

Requirements

  • Git
  • Python 2.7 with PIP and Virtualenv
  • Redis Server

Requirements

  • Git
  • Python 2.7 with PIP and Virtualenv
  • Redis Server

Running the application locally

You can run the app locally for testing by following these steps:

  1. From a terminal window, run git clone https://github.com/cachrisman/Plivo-2FA-App.git

  2. Removing the current .git folder in the project root using rm -rf .git/.

  3. Create a .env file in the project root with the following contents:

    PLIVO_AUTH_ID=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
PLIVO_AUTH_TOKEN=YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY
PLIVO_NUMBER=14155551234

    PLIVO_AUTH_ID and PLIVO_AUTH_TOKEN can be found in the Plivo Dashboard homepage and PLIVO_NUMBER should be set to a valid Plivo Number in your account from which you want to send the verification SMS.

  4. Install the redis server on your local machine:

  • OS X with Homebrew: Run brew install redis to install, then brew services start redis to start the server
  • OS X without Homebrew: follow the quickstart instructions on the redis website or google for os x install redis -homebrew for guides
  • Ubuntu: run sudo apt-get update;sudo apt-get install redis-server to install, then sudo service redis-server start to start the server
  1. Create a virtual environment by running virtualenv venv. NOTE: if you don't have virtualenv installed, run the command sudo pip install virtualenv to install virtualenv
  2. Activate the virtualenv using source ./venv/bin/activate.
  3. Install all the application's dependencies specified in requirements.txt using pip install -r requirements.txt.
  4. Now you can run the app locally by running this command python app.py in the project root and browsing to http://localhost:5000 to see if it works properly. When done testing, press CTRL+C to stop and exit the python server.

Deployment on Heroku

Initial Setup

This section explains how to prepare your system to deploy this app to Heroku.

  1. Create an account on Heroku (its free!).

  2. Verify your Heroku account and add a credit card. This app doesn't require any paid addons, but you still need to add your credit card to use free 3rd party Heroku addons.

  3. Install the Heroku toolbelt.

  4. Login to heroku from the toolbelt using the heroku login command. If you do not have an ssh public key in your system, it prompts to automatically create it. Hit 'Y' when prompted.

    $ heroku login
Enter your Heroku credentials.
Email: charlie@plivo.com
Password:
Could not find an existing public key.
Would you like to generate one? [Yn]
Generating new SSH public key.
Uploading ssh public key /Users/charlie/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

  5. Once this is done, you are ready to deploy the application.

The Actual Deployment

Click the button below to deploy directly to your heroku account:

Deploy

or follow these instructions to deploy to heroku:

  1. Run heroku create to create an application on Heroku and adds it as a remote to the local git repo.
  2. Run heroku addons:create redistogo:nano -a YOUR_APP_NAME (replace YOUR_APP_NAME with the name of the app created in step 1) to install the redistogo addon for this application.
  3. Push the local code to the heroku repo for deployment using git push heroku master.
  4. To run one web process as specified in the Procfile, run the heroku ps:scale web=1 command.
  5. You can see if it is running by using the heroku ps command. It should return something like web.1: up for 5s.
  6. You can check (and watch) the application logs using heroku logs -t command. Press CTRL+C to exit.
  7. To open the application in the web browser, type heroku open and hit ENTER.
  8. You'll see this application in the web browser.

Find the live demo of the application here. For more detailed information on deployment on heroku, visit the official heroku documentation. More information about Plivo APIs can be found in the offical API docs.

Helper libraries for various languages are available on the Plivo github page.