A simple chatbot that tells you the current weather and weather forecast.
It uses Node.JS for the backend server and it is connected to Facebook Messenger using the FB Messenger API. This repository provides code for hosting it both on Heroku and for hosting it on localhost(which can then be exposed using for example ngrok). It uses the Yahoo Weather API to get weather information.
The repository contains 2 branches, the master branch for deploying using localhost and the heroku branch for deploying using Heroku.
This chatbot uses simple pattern matching i.e. regular expressions to extract intents and entities. If the patterns match it appropriately calls the Yahoo Weather API and parses the response properly to give a nice human readable reply. All the code for webhook registration, receiving messages and sending messages has been written.
Rename template.development.json to development.json and enter in the actual values for pageAccessToken etc. by replacing the dummy values. On Heroku, set the environment variables to this instead.
- Node.JS version 10.11.0.
- NPM version 6.4.1
- A utility like ngrok Install the latest version by executing:
curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_11.x | sudo -E bash -
sudo apt-get install nodejs
Alternatively use nvm to install the specific version I used.
- All the node modules that are required are already present in the
package.json. They are:- "body-parser": "1.18.3",
- "colors": "1.3.2",
- "express": "4.16.4",
- "moment": "^2.22.2",
- "request": "2.88.0",
- "xregexp": "4.2.0",
- "yql": "1.0.2"
- To install these, use
npm iinside thevanilla-weather-botdirectory.
Start the server using node server.js and start ngrok. Register your webhook on Facebook Messenger. You're done, now you can start sending and receiving messages.
Simply use git to deploy the repository to Heroku. Set the environment variables as you would set them in development.json. Use the URL to register the webhook on Facebook Messenger. You're done!
