Twilio API: Can't download the jpeg file in an MMS - twilio

Question

I've built an SMS/MMS Lightning Component in Salesforce that uses Twilio. (You don't need to know anything about Salesforce to answer this question.) I'm able to display incoming MMS images using the MediaUrl provided. For that, I just put the MediaUrl in the img tag in the markup. From there, if I right-click the image, I can save to my computer, and it defaults to the filename used when the file was sent.
Now, I want to add a button to save the image to Salesforce Files (ContentVersion object). To do that, I'm making an HTTP GET call, expecting to get back the data in mime-type image/jpeg -- but instead, I'm getting back this XML response:
<TwilioResponse>
<Media>
<Sid/>
<AccountSid>[myAccountSid]</AccountSid>
<ParentSid/>
<ContentType/>
<DateCreated>Tue, 20 Nov 2018 01:11:04 +0000</DateCreated>
<DateUpdated>Tue, 20 Nov 201801:11:04 +0000</DateUpdated>
<Uri>/2010-04-01/Accounts/[myAccountSid]/Messages/MM96803e1b66cf37deb1bcf044799dbf8c/Media/ME46739a78eb197409a4a031896a22cab7</Uri>
</Media>
</TwilioResponse>
The Twilio docs here say you can get the media in the original mime-type by not including the .xml or .json extension on the URL. I'm not including an extension, and I'm even specifying the image/jpeg mime-type in the header. But still, I get the xml.
So, I can't get the actual media, just xml (or json) data about the media. I saw another thread saying I need to use the Uri to access the data -- but the Uri returned is exactly the same URL I'm calling originally -- the MediaUrl provided when the MMS is received.
Second issue is... how can I get that original file name. The browser knows the file name (it appears by default if I right-click and select Save As...), but I can't see any way to access it through the Twilio API.

Answer 1

This happens when the client you are using doesn't follow all the redirects for a URL of a media object. I was using PHP with file_get_contents() on a PHP 7.3 server and it wasn't following all of the redirects like I would have expected it to. I was getting the XML only like you described. I switched to using Guzzle and everything worked great using this code:
$client = new \GuzzleHttp\Client();
$client->get(
$url,
[
'save_to' => 'test.jpg',
]);
The way I found this was using a library that I was more familiar with that allowed me to disable redirects and I got the same response I was getting with PHPs file_get_contents(). Once I found that I could always get the XML if redirects were disabled, it was much easier to make progress.
I couldn't ever get file_get_contents to work with Twilio media URLs and gave up trying. Even specifying follow_location with file_get_contents() did not work (even though this should be the default) I tried this code, setting follow_location as well as other header values when trying to figure this out DID NOT WORK:
$opts = [
"http" => [
"follow_location" => '1',
"header" => "User-Agent: my-awesome-bot/1.0.0
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Accept: */*
Connection: close",
],
];
$context = stream_context_create($opts);
$media = file_put_contents('test.jpg', file_get_contents($url, false, $context));
# got XML for media object only, not the raw image data in test.jpg
As far as the original filename, I don't think that information is available from Twilio. It is possible that it isn't stored with the uploaded file as everything is referenced by the object, parent and/or account SIDs in all the APIs I've seen and the corresponding documentation.

Answer 2

Twilio's MMS urls redirect to an Amazon AWS url. So you have to first use curl to get what the Amazon URL is. Then you can fetch the contents of that amazon URL.
//set the url you're getting from twilio
$twilioUrl=$_POST['MediaUrl0'];
//use some curl to get where that url redirects to
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $twilioURL);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
$a = curl_exec($ch);
//here's that amazon url
$amazonURL = curl_getinfo($ch, CURLINFO_EFFECTIVE_URL);
//and now you can do stuff to it like get its contents
$contents=file_get_contents($amazonURL);