Bot for Messenger, From Scratch.
- Table of Contents
- Getting Started
- Accepting Webhooks
- Natural Language Processing
- Context & Session Management
- Deploying to AWS
- Conclusion
Everything needed to make the bot
- Node.js 8.x
- Express 4.x framework
- HTTP
- Redis
- EC2
- MySQL? MongoDB? either/or
- Ngrok
Prereq's:
- You must have experience with JavaScript and Node.js
- You'll be working with HTTP and REST APIs
- You'll be building a chatbot on Facebook’s Messenger Platform.
- A Facebook app / Facebook Developer Platform
- ngrok
- Node.js installed through the terminal
- An account with API.ai
- AWS account is necessary
- Github or Bitbucket account with knowledge on how to use GIT for code management.
The best way to get started with building this chatbot is to create an app on the Facebook Developer platform. This will get your Facebook app ready, but in order to test it, you will need to develop a webhook. All messages and data from Facebook will come to our app via this HTTP endpoint. In order to test webhooks, we need a server to forward live webhooks to our localhost. For live testing, we will use a service called Ngrok.