Sample-FB-ChatBot

Sample Server application and tutorial on creating a sample facebook chat bot

Prerequisites

• Basic knowledge in NodeJs
• Development environment with NodeJs installed
• Basic knowledge in Facebook Pages/Apps

Step 1 - Setting up the chat bot server

• Clone this repo

$ git clone https://github.com/PahanPerera/Sample-FB-ChatBot.git

• Install NodeJs dependencies

$ cd Sample-FB-ChatBot
$ npm install

• Run server

$ node server.js

If you are seeing "Example app listening on port 3010!", your server has been started successfully.

Step 2 - Setting up the Facebook Application

• Create Facebook App and Page https://developers.facebook.com/docs/messenger-platform/implementation#create_app_page
• Get Page access token https://developers.facebook.com/docs/messenger-platform/implementation#page_access_token (Save this token for later use)

Step 3 - Setting up Token in the server and prepare webhook

• Goto server.js file and replace <YOUR_VERIFY_TOKEN> with the token you got from the step 2. (server.js line 10)
• Restart the server
• Since Facebook only accept public https URLs as their webhooks, we need to expose our local server endpoints as public https. Quick way to do that is use https://localtunnel.me/
• Create a https public endpoint using https://localtunnel.me/ (Please make sure you disable your firewalls)

$ npm install -g localtunnel

• Tunnel our local server port

- lt --port 3010

• You will get something like https://gqgh.localtunnel.me which is your public base URL
• If you goto https://gqgh.localtunnel.me/webhook in your web brawser you will get a message saying "Error, wrong validation token"
• Once this is done goto https://developers.facebook.com/docs/messenger-platform/implementation#setup_webhook and setup the webhook that we just created in the Facebook Application

Step 4 - Subscribe Facebook App and Page

• Goto https://developers.facebook.com/docs/messenger-platform/implementation#subscribe_app_pages and subscripbe your application with your page

Step 5 - Done

• Now goto your Facebook page and send it a chat message, it will echo back the text you send.

Thank you for reading and your feedback is welcome.