You Can Send iMessages From Your Terminal | Linq CLI Tutorial

Added: 2026-06-03

[00:00:00]Hey everybody, I'm Patrick. I'm one of the co-founders and the CTO at Link.

[00:00:03][music] I'm excited to show you our CLI today. The CLI gives you unlimited access to our API all from within your terminal.

[00:00:11]>> [music] >> You can use it for free for up to 20 contacts. And you can start using it today. So, let's jump in and get started. The first thing I'm going to do is actually run install. So, I'm going to go grab that command. You can see the GitHub repo here.

[00:00:24]Um I'm going to grab this brew install command. I'm going to put it in my terminal.

[00:00:29]I'm going to kick that off. So, the install just finished. I'm going to clear out my terminal. And the first thing I'll do is just run the Link command. And you'll see the CLI will run and you'll get all of the commands that you can uh run using our CLI. The first thing I'm going to do is just log in. I already have a sandbox account and I'm going to use that API token from the sandbox account. If you don't already have an account, you can sign up within the CLI as well just using your phone number and email address and you can get access to a Link number right then uh without any other uh kind of steps. I'm going to go over to my sandbox dashboard. If you're signed up for the Link sandbox, you got an API token right here and we will use that. So, we'll say Link init.

[00:01:14]I will enter in my API token and I'll be authenticated in. It will give me a few commands that I can start with here. The first one is to create a chat. I'm going to go ahead and do that with my personal phone number um that I've got pulled up over here you can see. So, I'm going to type in my phone number.

[00:01:35]Then I'll send a message. I can be like What up? Hello world.

[00:01:45]And you can see that that popped up.

[00:01:46]Make a note, it gives you the chat ID here once you create the chat and send the first message in there. What I'm going to demo next is kind of a conversational flow. So, I'll show you how to start typing indicators, mark as read, all those kind of things. So, first step I'm going to say, "Hey there.

[00:02:02]How are you?"

[00:02:05]No question mark. Now, that message that I just sent is in the chat and we can actually use the chat ID to see all the messages in the chat. So, we [music] can say link messages list, give it the chat ID.

[00:02:18][music] I'm going to say limit two, so we'll only get the last two messages.

[00:02:24]And you can see those messages there, both the initial message that I sent and then the one inbound message that we got as well. We can grab those message IDs later to use those. So, up next, I want to, you know, as [music] a bot might do, mark that message that it got read.

[00:02:42]We're going to go link Uh let's make [music] sure that the docs say read.

[00:02:50]link chats read. [music] Yeah, link chats read is the command for that one.

[00:02:59]Read, and then we'll just give it that chat ID that we used at the beginning.

[00:03:05]And you [music] can see immediately that that message is marked as read. That mark as read will just mark the latest message in the chat read. And then, what would we do next? Um let's start typing indicators. [music] So, we'll go over to the docs again.

[00:03:21]And we'll find typing. [music] So, the way to start typing indicators in the chat using the CLI is just link chats typing with the chat ID.

[00:03:28]So, we [music] will do that and then give it the chat ID.

[00:03:33]And then [music] we'll see that the typing indicator started. Pretty cool.

[00:03:36]If you want to stop the typing indicators, you can do that with just {dash} [music] {dash} stop on the end.

[00:03:42]And you can see over here that the typing indicators [music] will stop.

[00:03:45]Let's say that the bot really liked that message and wants to kind of react with a >> [music] >> an emoji or or a kind of a reaction. So, we'll go reactions and you can see you need to give it the message ID and the [music] type of reaction that you want to do. So, we will do link messages react.

[00:04:06]We will get the message ID of the message that [music] we want to react to. What up? Hello world. Get that dash dash type.

[00:04:14]We'll say love.

[00:04:16]That will send that reaction and you'll see it pop up. Oh, but I gave it the wrong message ID.

[00:04:21]I'll grab this message ID actually.

[00:04:24]And you'll see both of them are love now. Up next, [music] to kind of wrap up the demo, I want to send a final message with an effect.

[00:04:32]Effects are a really fun thing that we support through our API.

[00:04:35]>> [music] >> Uh we'll go over here and see the effects syntax here. So, dash dash effect confetti. So, we will say link messages send and we will give it the uh chat ID that we want to send the [music] message in, that one that we had earlier. We'll say dash dash message and we'll say thanks [music] for the chat.

[00:05:05]Dot dot dot, make it a little mysterious [music] on the end. Uh dash dash effect confetti and then I'm going to run that command.

[00:05:13]And you will see that.

[00:05:17]Hooray!

[00:05:19]Okay, so that was the CLI. Remember, you can use it today for free with up to 20 contacts. Excited to see what y'all build with it.

[00:05:26]>> [music] >> I'll see you in the next one.