Star Wars: The Last Jedi comes out tonight and I am massively excited to see it. However, some of my other friends who are seeing the movie aren’t as familiar with the Star Wars universe as I am. Let’s use the amazing Star Wars API to build a Twilio powered SMS hack to help fix that.

We are going to use Twilio Functions to avoid having to go through the hassle of deploying a web application, the Star Wars API to gather relevant data on Star Wars characters, the Giphy API to grab GIFs of those characters, and Twilio SMS to facilitate the communications with our users.

Working with the Star Wars API

The Star Wars API is a very simple REST API that only functions using GET requests. Twilio functions gives us access to Got, which we can use for these HTTP requests. In particular, we’ll be working with the people endpoint.