Note in 2019: I've created a small side project website that let's you quickly send off a fax with no hassle in case you don't want to mess with a Python script: FaxASAP.com
If you want to send a simple fax quickly, cheaply, and painlessly, Phaxio and Python make a nice combo. Below is a litte script that I wrote, based on this Ruby script by Pete Keen that is slightly out of date. There are Phaxios Python libraries, but I ran into a couple issues, and this seems to be the most brain-dead simple solution. Pros: No external dependencies. Cons: It uses the shell=True
parameter for subprocess.call
, but that shouldn’t be an issue since you’re only using this to send a quick fax at 2 AM and you don’t want to pay UPS/FedEx/whomever too much money for that privilege tomorrow, right?
Note that I’m not affiliated with Phaxio in any way, it just happens to be late, I needed to send a fax, and they checked all the right boxes. I stumbled on Phaxio, but for someone just wanting to send a quick fax once every year or so, it’s great. Pricing is about $0.07 a page (and I received $1.00 account credit just for signing up at the time of writing this), so it’s perfect for my use case.
Setup
- Sign up for an account with Phaxio: https://www.phaxio.com/
- Get your API Keys: Phaxio API Credentials
- Put them into the script below (You can also use the Test keys to make sure this works before trying too.)
- Run the script, for example, if I saved the script to
fax.py
, I’m sending to Tommy Tutone, and my file to send isletter.pdf
, I would use the following:./fax.py +15558675309 /path/to/letter.pdf
#!/usr/bin/env python3
from subprocess import call
import sys
if len(sys.argv) <= 2:
print("Usage: send_fax NUMBER FILENAME...")
exit(-1)
number = sys.argv[1]
api_key = 'put_api_key_here'
api_secret = 'put_api_secret_here'
command_args = [
"curl",
"https://api.phaxio.com/v2/faxes",
"-u '{}:{}'".format(api_key, api_secret),
"-F 'to={}'".format(number)
]
for file in sys.argv[2:]:
command_args.append("-F 'file=@{}'".format(file))
call(' '.join(command_args), shell=True)
The script can be found in this GitHub Gist here: https://gist.github.com/seanlane/67504bf39696de8c0bc88ad89844f9df
Feel free to fork it and suggest improvements.
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