__  __  __  __  __   __  ______  ______  ______       __     __  ______  ______  __  __   __      __  __    
/\ \_\ \/\ \/\ \/\ "-.\ \/\__  _\/\  ___\/\  == \     /\ \  _ \ \/\  ___\/\  ___\/\ \/ /  /\ \    /\ \_\ \   
\ \  __ \ \ \_\ \ \ \-.  \/_/\ \/\ \  __\\ \  __<     \ \ \/ ".\ \ \  __\\ \  __\\ \  _"-.\ \ \___\ \____ \  
 \ \_\ \_\ \_____\ \_\\"\_\ \ \_\ \ \_____\ \_\ \_\    \ \__/".~\_\ \_____\ \_____\ \_\ \_\\ \_____\/\_____\ 
  \/_/\/_/\/_____/\/_/ \/_/  \/_/  \/_____/\/_/ /_/     \/_/   \/_/\/_____/\/_____/\/_/\/_/ \/_____/\/_____/ 
                                                                                                            

Table of Contents

• Overview
• Pre-requisites
• Project Structure
• Setup
• Deployment
• Testing
• Lessons Learned

Overview

Hunter Weekly is a weekly notification task that sends a text message to a group of family members notifiying them of our weekly family video calls. This project is supported with AWS and Twilio. It uses Twilio SMS to send text messages to the family member and AWS to run the script every Wednesday at 9 PM EST. The AWS resources is deployed with AWS-CDK.

Pre-requisites

• NVM
• Node.js v20
• Python v3.8
• AWS CLI
• AWS CDK
• Twilio SMS

Setup

1. Run nvm use for the correct version of Node.js.
2. Run npm install -g aws-cdk to install the AWS CDK.
3. Run export AWS_PROFILE=profile_name to set the AWS profile.

Note: Programmatically update cdk.json property profile to the name of the AWS profile.

4. Create .env file with the following properties:

EMAIL=YOUR_EMAIL

5. Run python3 -m venv .venv to create a virtual environment.
6. Run source .venv/bin/activate to activate the virtual environment.
7. Run pip install -r requirements.txt to install the required dependencies.

Deployment

In order for the project to kick off these are the required secrets needed in AWS Secrets Manager:

• TWILIO_ACCOUNT_SID
• TWILIO_AUTH_TOKEN
• TWILIO_PHONE_NUMBER
• GOOGLE_MEET_LINK

The FAMILY_MEMBERS property is a comma separated list of phone numbers that will receive the text message following this format

{
  "NAME": "John Doe",
  "NUMBER": "+1234567890"
}

To deploy the project run the following commands:

1. Run cdk diff to see the changes that will be made.
2. Run cdk deploy to deploy the project.
3. Go to your email and confirm the subscription to the SNS topic.

Testing

Run python -m unittest to run the tests.

Lessons Learned

• To add a layer for Python dependencies the file path that needs to be compressed must follow a file structure of python/{NAME_OF_LIBRARY}
• By default Lambda functions are deployed with a 512MB memory limit. This can be increased to 3GB.
• By default Lambda functions are deployed with a 15 second timeout. This can be increased to 15 minutes. For this project I had to increase to 5 minutes.
• To compress the code for the Lambda function you must have the contents needed in the file. If there is an extra folder or path it will need to be updated in the handler prop for the Lambda AWS-CDK construct.
• Twilio numbers must be sent as a string with the country code. For example +1234567890.