Rasa Open Source

Rasa is an open source machine learning framework to automate text-and voice-based conversations. With Rasa, you can build contexual assistants on:

Facebook Messenger
Slack
Google Hangouts
Webex Teams
Microsoft Bot Framework
Rocket.Chat
Mattermost
Telegram
Twilio
Your own custom conversational channels

or voice assistants as:

Alexa Skills
Google Home Actions

Rasa helps you build contextual assistants capable of having layered conversations with lots of back-and-forth. In order for a human to have a meaningful exchange with a contextual assistant, the assistant needs to be able to use context to build on things that were previously discussed – Rasa enables you to build assistants that can do this in a scalable way.

There's a lot more background information in this blog post.

What does Rasa do? 🤔 Check out our Website
I'm new to Rasa 😄 Get Started with Rasa
I'd like to read the detailed docs 🤓 Read The Docs
I'm ready to install Rasa 🚀 Installation
I want to learn how to use Rasa 🚀 Tutorial
I have a question ❓ Rasa Community Forum
I would like to contribute 🤗 How to Contribute

Where to get help

There is extensive documentation in the Rasa Docs. Make sure to select the correct version so you are looking at the docs for the version you installed.

Please use Rasa Community Forum for quick answers to questions.

How to contribute

We are very happy to receive and merge your contributions into this repository!

To contribute via pull request, follow these steps:

Create an issue describing the feature you want to work on (or have a look at the contributor board)
Write your code, tests and documentation, and format them with black
Create a pull request describing your changes

For more detailed instructions on how to contribute code, check out these code contributor guidelines.

You can find more information about how to contribute to Rasa (in lots of different ways!) on our website..

Your pull request will be reviewed by a maintainer, who will get back to you about any necessary changes or questions. You will also be asked to sign a Contributor License Agreement.

Development Internals

Installing Poetry

Rasa uses Poetry for packaging and dependency management. If you want to build it from source, you have to install Poetry first. This is how it can be done:

curl -sSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/python-poetry/poetry/master/get-poetry.py | python

There are several other ways to install Poetry. Please, follow the official guide to see all possible options.

Managing environments

The official Poetry guide suggests to use pyenv or any other similar tool to easily switch between Python versions. This is how it can be done:

pyenv install 3.7.6
pyenv local 3.7.6  # Activate Python 3.7.6 for the current project

By default, Poetry will try to use the currently activated Python version to create the virtual environment for the current project automatically. You can also create and activate a virtual environment manually — in this case, Poetry should pick it up and use it to install the dependencies. For example:

python -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate

You can make sure that the environment is picked up by executing

poetry env info

Building from source

To install dependencies and rasa itself in editable mode execute

make install

Running and changing the documentation

First of all, install all the required dependencies:

make install

After the installation has finished, you can run and view the documentation locally using:

make livedocs

Visit the local version of the docs at http://localhost:8000 in your browser. You can now change the docs locally and the web page will automatically reload and apply your changes.

Running the Tests

In order to run the tests, make sure that you have the development requirements installed:

export PIP_USE_PEP517=false
make prepare-tests-ubuntu # Only on Ubuntu and Debian based systems
make prepare-tests-macos  # Only on macOS

Then, run the tests:

make test

They can also be run at multiple jobs to save some time:

JOBS=[n] make test

Where [n] is the number of jobs desired. If omitted, [n] will be automatically chosen by pytest.

Resolving merge conflicts

Poetry doesn't include any solution that can help to resolve merge conflicts in the lock file poetry.lock by default. However, there is a great tool called poetry-merge-lock. Here is how use can install it:

pip install poetry-merge-lock

Just execute this command to resolve merge conflicts in poetry.lock automatically:

poetry-merge-lock

Steps to release a new version

Releasing a new version is quite simple, as the packages are build and distributed by GitHub Actions.

Terminology:

patch release (third version part increases): 1.1.2 -> 1.1.3
minor release (second version part increases): 1.1.3 -> 1.2.0
major release (first version part increases): 1.2.0 -> 2.0.0

Release steps:

Make sure all dependencies are up to date (especially Rasa SDK)
- For Rasa SDK that means first creating a new Rasa SDK release (make sure the version numbers between the new Rasa and Rasa SDK releases match)
- Once the tag with the new Rasa SDK release is pushed and the package appears on pypi, the dependency in the rasa repository can be resolved (see below).
Switch to the branch you want to cut the release from (master in case of a major / minor, the current feature branch for patch releases)
- Update the rasa-sdk entry in pyproject.toml with the new release version and run poetry update. This creates a new poetry.lock file with all dependencies resolved.
- Commit the changes with git commit -am "bump rasa-sdk dependency" but do not push them. They will be automatically picked up by the following step.
Run make release
Create a PR against master or the release branch (e.g. 1.2.x)
Once your PR is merged, tag a new release (this SHOULD always happen on master or release branches), e.g. using
```
git tag 1.2.0 -m "next release"
git push origin 1.2.0
```
GitHub will build this tag and push a package to pypi
If this is a minor release, a new release branch should be created pointing to the same commit as the tag to allow for future patch releases, e.g.
```
git checkout -b 1.2.x
git push origin 1.2.x
```

Code Style

To ensure a standardized code style we use the formatter black. To ensure our type annotations are correct we use the type checker pytype. If your code is not formatted properly or doesn't type check, GitHub will fail to build.

Formatting

If you want to automatically format your code on every commit, you can use pre-commit. Just install it via pip install pre-commit and execute pre-commit install in the root folder. This will add a hook to the repository, which reformats files on every commit.

If you want to set it up manually, install black via poetry install. To reformat files execute

make formatter

Type Checking

If you want to check types on the codebase, install pytype using poetry install. To check the types execute

make types

Deploying documentation updates

We use sphinx-versioning to build docs for tagged versions and for the master branch. The static site that gets built is pushed to the docs branch of this repo, which doesn't contain any code, only the site.

We host the site on netlify. On master branch builds (see .github/workflows/documentation.yml), we push the built docs to the docs branch. Netlify automatically re-deploys the docs pages whenever there is a change to that branch.

License

A list of the Licenses of the dependencies of the project can be found at the bottom of the Libraries Summary.

Chriszhangmw/rasa