Twilio Not doing anything when receiving SMS - twilio

Question

I'm creating a sample application that will post alerts to the website in the event of a hurricane or service outage. I'm not using Laravel.
I set the URL of the page in my account settings. The first time I sent a message I received a HTTP error that it had timed out without being given a reponse. I edited the XML and tried again.
I'm not getting anything in the database and I'm not getting the response. I also wrote a sample page that posts a value to see if it would work and it did. It posted it into the database and showed correctly formatted XML.
<?php
$response = 'This number cannot handle automated replies...';
$twiml1 = '<response><sms>';
$twiml2 = '</sms></response>';
require_once '../settings/db.php';
if (isset($_POST['body'])) {
$body = strip_tags($_POST['body']);
$sql = "INSERT INTO alerts (message) VALUES ('$body')";
$result = $db->query($sql);
if ($result) {
$response = 'Thanks. Your message was posted on the website.';
} else {
$response = 'There was a query error.';
}
}
header('Content-type: application/xml');
echo $twiml1;
echo $response;
echo $twiml2;

Answer 1

Twilio developer evangelist here.
Parameters that are sent via webhooks from Twilio are case sensitive and start with a capital letter. The text for an incoming message is sent as the Body parameter so checking for $_POST['body'] won't work.
I'd update your conditional to:
if (isset($_POST['Body'])) {
$body = strip_tags($_POST['Body']);
// The rest
}
Also, just to note, the <Sms> element has been deprecated. I'd use the <Message> element instead. The tags are case sensitive too, so I'd update the TwiML section to this:
$twiml1 = '<Response><Message>';
$twiml2 = '</Message></Response>';
Let me know if that helps at all.