Quick starter guide

Gammu family

Gammu family consists of several programs and libraries:

Gammu Utility: Command line utility to talk to the phone. It performs one time operations only.
Wammu: Graphical interface for Gammu, providing basic functions.
gammu-smsd: Daemon to receive and send messages using your phone.
gammu-smsd-inject: Injects outgoing messages into gammu-smsd queue.
gammu-smsd-monitor: Monitors state of Gammu SMS Daemon. It periodically displays information about phone and number of processed messages.
gammu-detect: Simple utility to detect phones or modems connected to computer.
python-gammu: Python bindings for Gammu, use it from Python scripts.
libGammu: Core library, used by all other parts and you can use it directly in your C programs.

Installing Gammu

On most platforms you can install Gammu from binaries - most Linux distributions ship Gammu and for Windows you can download binaries from Gammu website. You can find more detailed instructions (including instructions for compiling from source) in Installing Gammu.

Starting with Gammu on Linux

First you need to find out device name where your phone/modem is connected. In most cases you can rely on gammu-detect to find it (it will also list all serial ports in your systems, where probably nothing is connected).

Generally for most current modems you will end up with /dev/ttyUSB0.

The next step is to create configuration file in ~/.gammurc (see Gammu Configuration File):

[gammu]
device = /dev/ttyUSB0
connection = at

And you can connect to the phone:

$ gammu identify
Device               : /dev/ttyUSB0
Manufacturer         : Wavecom
Model                : MULTIBAND  900E  1800 (MULTIBAND  900E  1800)
Firmware             : 641b09gg.Q2403A 1320676 061804 14:38
IMEI                 : 123456789012345
SIM IMSI             : 987654321098765

Starting with Gammu on Windows

First you need to find out device name where your phone/modem is connected. The easiest way is to look into Device manager under Ports (COM & LPT) and lookup correct COM port there.

Generally for most current modems you will end up with something like COM12.

The next step is to create configuration file in $PROFILE\Application Data\gammurc (see Gammu Configuration File):

[gammu]
device = COM12:
connection = at

And you can connect to the phone:

C:\Program Files\Gammu 1.33.0\bin> gammu identify
Device               : COM12:
Manufacturer         : Wavecom
Model                : MULTIBAND  900E  1800 (MULTIBAND  900E  1800)
Firmware             : 641b09gg.Q2403A 1320676 061804 14:38
IMEI                 : 123456789012345
SIM IMSI             : 987654321098765

Starting with SMSD

Note

Before starting with SMSD, make sure you can connect to your phone using Gammu (see chapters above for guide how to do that).

Once you have configured Gammu, running gammu-smsd is pretty easy. You need to decide where you want to store messages (see Service). For this example we will stick with MySQL database, but the instructions are quite similar for any storage service.

Note

You can not run Gammu and Gammu SMSD at same time on single device, you can workaround this limitation by suspending SMSD temporarily using SIGUSR1 and SIGUSR2 signals (see also Signals and Invoking Gammu and suspending SMSD):

Configuring the storage

First we have to setup the actual storage. With MySQL, we need access to the MySQL server. Now connect as administrative user to the server (usually root), grant privileges to the smsd user and create smsd database:

GRANT USAGE ON *.* TO 'smsd'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'password';

GRANT SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE ON `smsd`.* TO 'smsd'@'localhost';

CREATE DATABASE smsd;

Once this is ready, you should import the tables structure. It is shipped as docs/sql/mysql.sql with Gammu, so all you have to do is to import this file (see Creating tables for MySQL for more details):

$ mysql -u root -p password smsd < docs/sql/mysql.sql

Configuring SMSD

Now we just have to tell SMSD what service it is supposed to use. This is done in the SMSD configuration file. You can place it anywhere and tell SMSD on startup where it can find it, but on Linux the recommended location for system wide service is /etc/gammu-smsdrc (see SMSD Configuration File for more information).

You have to put both modem and storage service configuration into this file:

[gammu]
device = /dev/ttyUSB0
connection = at

[smsd]
service = SQL
driver = native_mysql
host = localhost
database = smsd
user = smsd
password = password

There are many ways to customize SMSD, but the defaults should work fine in most environments. You can find more information on customizing SMSD in SMSD Configuration File.

Running SMSD

With configuration file ready, you can actually start SMSD. You can do this manually or as a system wide service.

For manual startup, just execute it:

$ gammu-smsd

Alternatively you can specify path to the configuration file:

$ gammu-smsd -c /path/to/gammu-smsdrc

The binary packages on Linux usually come with support for starting SMSD as a system wide daemon.

With systemd, you can start it by:

$ systemctl start gammu-smsd.service

Sending message through SMSD

Once SMSD is up and running, you can send some messages using it:

$ gammu-smsd-inject TEXT 123456 -text "All your base are belong to us"

You can find more examples in the gammu-smsd-inject documentation: Examples.