Delivery Reports

Overview

Delivery reports serve as your callback service, informing you of the status of messages sent to a specific destination (outbound message) or received on your Plivo number (inbound message).

When a call to the Message API to send a message completes successfully, your message is put into a queue to be sent to its destination. By default, you do not receive an automatic notification regarding the delivery of your message. To get notified about the status of your message, include the url parameter in your API request. This generates a notification when your message reaches its destination, or if it fails to deliver. Your delivery report will show the status — “queued”, “sent”, “delivered”, “undelivered” or “failed” — for each recipient, along with other parameters.

You can find SMS delivery reports by visiting Messaging > Logs on the Plivo console.

Similarly, if you want a delivery report when you receive an SMS message on your Plivo number, update the Message URL of the application associated with your Plivo number. Your delivery report will show the status — “delivered” or “undelivered” — along with incoming message details.

Note: Long SMS messages are automatically split for sending and concatenated upon receipt for a seamless user experience. When checking message logs and delivery reports for long SMS messages that are split, look for the MessageUUID, which is the same in all related split messages and identical to the UUID of the first message in the split sequence of messages.

Prerequisites

To get started, you need a Plivo account — sign up with your work email address if you don’t have one already. To receive incoming messages, you must have a Plivo phone number that supports SMS; you can rent numbers from the Numbers page of the Plivo console or by using the Numbers API. If this is your first time using Plivo APIs, follow our instructions to set up a PHP development environment and a web server and safely expose that server to the internet.

Here’s how the process works for inbound messages.

Inbound

Create a Laravel controller to receive and respond to messages

Change to the project directory and run this command.

$ php artisan make:controller SMSController

This command generates a controller named SMSController in the app/http/controllers/ directory. Edit app/http/controllers/SMSController.php and paste into it this code.

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<?php

namespace App\Http\Controllers;

use Illuminate\Http\Request;

class SMSController extends Controller
{
    public function delivery_report()
    {	
        $from_number = $_POST["From"];
        $to_number = $_POST["To"];
        $text = $_POST["Text"];
        error_log(print_r("Message received - From $from_number, To: $to_number, Text: $text"));
    }
}

Add a route

Edit routes/web.php and add this line at the end of the file.

Route::match(['get', 'post'], '/delivery_report', 'SMSController@delivery_report');
Note: If you’re using Laravel 8, use the fully qualified class name for your controllers — for example:
Route::match(['get', 'post'], '/delivery_report', 'App\Http\Controllers\SMSController@delivery_report');

For ngrok test, add this line to mylaravelapp/quickstart/app/Http/Middleware/VerifyCsrfToken.php.
protected $except = ['*'];

Run your code.

$ php artisan serve

You should see your basic server application in action at http://localhost:8000/delivery_report.

Expose your local server to the internet.

Note: For ngrok testing, add this line to config/environments/development.rb.
config.hosts << /[a-z0-9-]+\.ngrok\.io/

Create an application

Associate the code you created with Plivo by creating a Plivo application. Visiting Messaging > Applications and click Add New Application. You can also use Plivo’s Application API.

Give your application a name — we called ours Delivery Reports. Enter the server URL you want to use (for example https://<yourdomain>.com/delivery_report/) in the Message URL field and set the method to POST. Click Create Application to save your application.

Create Application

Assign a Plivo number to your application

Navigate to the Numbers page and select the phone number you want to use for this application. From the Application Type drop-down, select XML Application. From the Plivo Application drop-down, select Receive SMS (the name we gave the application). Click Update Number to save.

Assign Phone Number to Receive Delivery Reports

Test

Send an SMS message to your Plivo number using a regular mobile phone. Plivo will send a request to your Message URL with the parameters listed in the Messaging documentation.

You can view the details posted by Plivo by looking at your terminal.

Prerequisites

To get started, you need a Plivo account — sign up with your work email address if you don’t have one already. To receive incoming messages, you must have a Plivo phone number that supports SMS; you can rent numbers from the Numbers page of the Plivo console or by using the Numbers API. If this is your first time using Plivo APIs, follow our instructions to set up a PHP development environment and a web server and safely expose that server to the internet.

Here’s how the process works for outbound messages.

Outbound

Create a Laravel controller to receive and respond to messages

Change to the project directory and run this command.

$ php artisan make:controller SMSController

This command generates a controller named SMSController in the app/http/controllers/ directory. Edit app/http/controllers/SMSController.php and paste into it this code.

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<?php

namespace App\Http\Controllers;

use Illuminate\Http\Request;

class SMSController extends Controller
{
    public function delivery_report()
    {	
		    $from_number = $_POST["From"];
        $to_number = $_POST["To"];
        $status = $_POST["Status"];
        error_log(print_r("Message received - From $from_number, To: $to_number, Status: $status"));
    }
}

Add a route

Edit routes/web.php and add this line at the end of the file.

Route::match(['get', 'post'], '/delivery_report', 'SMSController@delivery_report');
Note: If you’re using Laravel 8, use the fully qualified class name for your controllers — for example:
Route::match(['get', 'post'], '/delivery_report', 'App\Http\Controllers\SMSController@delivery_report');

For ngrok test, add this line to mylaravelapp/quickstart/app/Http/Middleware/VerifyCsrfToken.php.
protected $except = ['*'];

Run your code.

$ php artisan serve

You should see your basic server application in action at http://localhost:8000/delivery_report.

Expose your local server to the internet.

Note: For ngrok testing, add this line to config/environments/development.rb.
config.hosts << /[a-z0-9-]+\.ngrok\.io/

Test

To test delivery reports on outbound messages, send an SMS message to a mobile phone using this code.

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

$client = new RestClient("<auth_id>","<auth_token>");
$response = $client->messages->create(
  [  
    "src" => "<sender_id>",
    "dst" => "<destination_number>",
    "text" => "Hello, this is a sample text",
    "url" => "https://<ngrok_url>/delivery_report/"
 ]
);
print_r($response);
?>

Replace the phone number placeholders with actual phone numbers in E.164 format (for example, +12025551234) and url with the ngrok-generated URL.

Plivo will send a request to your url with the parameters listed in the Messaging documentation.

You can view the details posted by Plivo by looking at your terminal.