How to get Twilio to work on Free accounts with the proxy (fixing requests ConnectonError in HTTPSConnectionPool)

If you're trying to use Twilio on a PythonAnywhere free account, you're likely to run into an error that looks like this:

urllib3.exceptions.MaxRetryError: HTTPSConnectionPool(host='api.twilio.com', port=443): Max retries exceeded with url: /2010-04-01/Accounts/xxxxxx/Messages.json (Caused by NewConnectionError('<urllib3.connection.VerifiedHTTPSConnection object at 0x7fe7acca1630>: Failed to establish a new connection: [Errno 111] Connection refused',))

The Twilio API client needs to be told how to connect to the proxy server that free accounts use to access the external Internet. The code to use to do that differs based on which version of the client library you're using:

Twilio 6.35.0 onwards:¶

import os
from twilio.rest import Client
from twilio.http.http_client import TwilioHttpClient

proxy_client = TwilioHttpClient(proxy={'http': os.environ['http_proxy'], 'https': os.environ['https_proxy']})

account_sid = 'your account id here'
auth_token = 'your twilio token here'

client = Client(account_sid, auth_token, http_client=proxy_client)

# twilio api calls will now work from behind the proxy:
message = client.messages.create(to="...", from_='...', body='...')

Older versions:¶

import os
from twilio.rest import Client
from twilio.http.http_client import TwilioHttpClient

proxy_client = TwilioHttpClient()
proxy_client.session.proxies = {'https': os.environ['https_proxy']}

account_sid = 'your account id here'
auth_token = 'your twilio token here'

client = Client(account_sid, auth_token, http_client=proxy_client)

# twilio api calls will now work from behind the proxy:
message = client.messages.create(to="...", from_='...', body='...')