How do I automatically cleanup old Twilio Chat Channels on a schedule?

Question

I built a production application that uses Twilio Programmable Chat for one of its features. It occurred to me that the app creates lots and lots of chat channels each day and there is no way to expire them automatically. Twilio limits you to 1,000 chat channels (I believe) and it wouldn't take long to hit the limit if I didn't clean them up using some sort of scheduled job that runs each night.

So, the ideal solution would use node.js and some sort of scheduler to retrieve all of my old chat channels created previously and delete them all for maintenance purposes.

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered May 12 '20 at 20:36

Here is the code I wrote to run every night at 2AM and delete all of the old chat channels created previously. I used node-cron to handle the scheduling and node.js for the rest. I hope it helps anyone who has a similar need. I also created a public github repo for the project here.

// **************************************************************
//This script handles deleting old Twilio Chat channels.It should be run as a scheduled job every night during off hours 
// **************************************************************
// **************************************************************

// Use express for listener only
const express = require("express");
app = express();

// We use node-cron to run this script every day at 2 AM
const cron = require("node-cron");

// Twilio authentication keys and values - be sure to replace with your account SID and Keys from the Twilio console at https://www.twilio.com/console and https://www.twilio.com/console/chat/dashboard
const twilioAccountSid = 'AC52419cd4407b77c253fff2eda1c56503'; //ACCOUNT SID from Twilio Console
const twilioChatSService = 'ISXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX'; //Chat Service SID from Twilio Chat Console
const theToken = `XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX`; //AUTH TOKEN from Twilio Console

// Run daily at 2 AM
cron.schedule("00 02 * * *", function () {
    console.log("---------------------");
    console.log("Running Cron Job");

    // Retrieve all chat channels we created since we last checked
    const client = require('twilio')(twilioAccountSid, theToken);

    client.chat.services(twilioChatSService)
        .channels
        .list({ limit: 1000 })
        .then(channels => {
            channels.forEach(c => {
                // Remove each channel one by one
                client.chat.services(twilioChatSService)
                    .channels(c.sid)
                    .remove();

                console.log(`removed - ${c.sid}`);
            })
        });

    console.log(`Finished fetching chat channels`);
});

console.log(`Waiting until 2AM each day to delete all old chat channels`);
app.listen("3128");

https://github.com/kboice23/Twilio-Scheduled-Chat-Channel-Cleanup

How do I automatically cleanup old Twilio Chat Channels on a schedule?

1 Answers1