Phone auth with Textmagic

Textmagic is a business text messaging service. Its web app and REST API send and receive SMS, and its dashboard manages your API keys, sender numbers, and sender IDs.

How does the integration work?

If you self-host Appwrite, you can use Textmagic to deliver the one-time passwords (OTPs) that Appwrite Auth sends by SMS. Appwrite uses the provider you configure for phone (SMS) login, phone number verification, SMS challenges for multi-factor authentication, and team invitations sent to a phone number.

Phone authentication lets users sign in without a password, which suits mobile apps where users already have their phone at hand.

How to implement

To implement the Textmagic provider for phone authentication, there are several steps you must complete:

Step 1: Set up Textmagic

First, sign up for a Textmagic account. Then save the following information from the Textmagic dashboard:

Step 2: Add Textmagic to your Appwrite instance

For this step, you must self-host Appwrite if you haven't already.

Open the .env file of your Appwrite installation and update the following environment variables:

_APP_SMS_PROVIDER=sms://<USERNAME>:<API_KEY>@textmagic
_APP_SMS_FROM=<PHONE_NUMBER_OR_SENDER_ID>

Use textmagic, without a hyphen, as the provider name in the URL. Write a phone number with a leading + and the country code, such as +14155550123. URL-encode the values in _APP_SMS_PROVIDER if they contain characters other than letters and numbers. Appwrite only turns on SMS delivery when both variables are set.

Then recreate your Appwrite stack and confirm the variables were applied:

docker compose up -d
docker compose exec appwrite vars

Step 3: Test the provider

To test the provider, implement phone (SMS) login in a web or mobile app. Request a code for your phone number, then create a session with the code you receive:

import { Client, Account, ID } from "appwrite";

const client = new Client()
    .setEndpoint('https://<APPWRITE_DOMAIN>/v1')
    .setProject('<PROJECT_ID>');

const account = new Account(client);

const token = await account.createPhoneToken({
    userId: ID.unique(),
    phone: '+14255550123'
});

const session = await account.createSession({
    userId: token.userId,
    secret: '<SECRET>'
});

After you sign in, the user appears on the Auth page of your project with their phone number as the identifier.

Read more about Textmagic and Appwrite Auth

If you would like to learn more about phone authentication with Textmagic and Appwrite Auth, we have some resources that you should visit: