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You're ready for this Quickstart if you've got the following:

A free trial account
A registered application
A configured FreeClimb Number
Your tools and language installed

Clone Your Sample App

To help you get started we've put together a library of sample applications. For this Quickstart, clone the repository for Node Getting Started Tutorial using Github's interface or git in the command line.

git clone https://github.com/FreeClimbAPI/Node-Getting-Started-Tutorial.git

You can access the full sample app library through your Dashboard or the FreeClimbAPI Github repositories.

Add your credentials to your project

Now that you've cloned the repo for your sample app, the next step is to add your API credentials so you can authenticate with FreeClimb. To do this, first copy your account ID and API key from your Dashboard homepage.

Create a .env file in the root directory of your repo. Make sure to add the file to your .gitignore file. Add your account ID and API key to your .env file, and save the file. Your .env file should look something like this:

ACCOUNT_ID=YOUR-ACCOUNT-TOKEN
API_KEY=YOUR-API-KEY

The sample app uses Dotenv to read in your credentials, and anything else you save, as environment variables.

Make Your Local Server Publicly Accessible

The fastest way to start testing your FreeClimb application is to temporarily make your local server publicly accessible through a tunneling service. We'll use ngrok to do this. Start by downloading Ngrok. Unzip the file to install, then open your terminal and navigate to the directory where you've unzipped Ngrok. Use the following command to start a HTTP tunnel on port 80.

./ngrok http 80

Once you run ngrok you should receive a response with a public URL, that looks something like this:

ngrok by @inconshreveable

Tunnel Status                 online
Version                       2.0/2.0
Web Interface                 http://127.0.0.1:4040
Forwarding                    http://92832de0.ngrok.io -> localhost:80
Forwarding                    https://92832de0.ngrok.io -> localhost:80

Connnections                  ttl     opn     rt1     rt5     p50     p90
                              0       0       0.00    0.00    0.00    0.00

The Forwarding URLs point to your local server. Save the URLs and go on to the next step.

Configure Your Application's Endpoints

Now that you've got a public URL you're ready to configure your application's endpoints. We'll be configuring the voiceUrl using your Ngrok URL and the route reference /incomingCall.

Go to the Apps page in your Dashboard. You should see your registered FreeClimb app.

Open its App Config, and you'll see its application ID, alias, and some options for URL configuration. Enter your ngrok URL into the voiceUrl field, and add the route /incomingCall at the end of the URL.

https://YOUR-URL.ngrok.io/incomingCall

When you're done the App Config should look something like this:

Save your updated App Config.

Experience Your App

Once you've updated your App Config with your public URLs you're all ready to run your app! Run the application with the command:

node gettingStarted-2.js

Once the app is running, dial your configured FreeClimb number. If everything is set up right you should hear the message, "Hello world!" and then the call will end.

Congratulations! You've just made your first voice calling application!

Next Steps

For a more detailed explanation of the code used, see How to Accept an Incoming Call.