centre-for-educational-technology/sherpa-helper

SHERPA Chatbot Interface

Installation and development

Checkout suitable branch. Though master branch is used for development, it should still be stable enough to use in production. Change the .env file and provide configurations for reCAPTCHA, CBR Inference Engine and KnowledgeBase (KB) services.

Once all the configurations are provided local development can commence or a production package could be built. Built static assets are the ones that should be used on the server.

Install all the required dependencies

Current stable Node.js version should work. Currently, used version is 14. Please use an older version if you run into issues while installing the dependencies.

npm install

Compiles and hot-reloads for development

npm run serve

Compiles and minifies for production

npm run build

Run your unit tests

npm run test:unit

Run your end-to-end tests

npm run test:e2e

Lints and fixes files

npm run lint

Customize configuration

See Configuration Reference.

Docker and containers

Use any stable branch for building a docker container as it will have all the necessary .env file configurations set during build time. Docker image requires some configuration logic to be available at runtime, which would make changes to the package configuration.

Container uses node image to build the package, then bases itself on the latest nginx container to serve the static assets.

Required environment variables:

• APP_RECAPTCHA_KEY - recaptcha V3 key that will be used when submitting suggestions to the Knowledge Base service
• APP_CHATBOT_URL - base ULR of the chatterbot powered service that will be used to ask questions
• APP_KNOWLEDGE_BASE_URL - Knowledge Base service URL, used to submit suggestions and ratings

Build container image

docker build -t sherpa/helper .

Run container

Please make sure that you provide correct values for all the environment variables. The ones used in the command are merely placeholders.

docker run -d --name=sherpa-helper \
-e APP_RECAPTCHA_KEY=12345 \
-e APP_CHATBOT_URL=http://chatbot \
-e APP_KNOWLEDGE_BASE_URL=http://knowledgebase \
-p80:80 sherpa/helper

Docker Compose

Please see a sample docker-compose.yml file located in docker/ subdirectory. It requires you to build the Docker image before you run it. You would also need to provide correct environment values and replace the placeholders.

docker-compose -p sherpa-helper up -d

Stop and remove containers:

docker-compose -p sherpa-helper down

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Supported by Erasmus+ funding programme.

LICENSE

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.