Yak

This project lets you build a chatbot, without having to write the boilerplate. Fork it for your own project and start modifying and extending. If improvements are made to this project which you require, add this repository as an upstream git remote and merge it into your forked repo.

Documentation exists on the Github wiki.

Dependencies:

We depend on a few technologies, please make sure you have the below prerequisites.

CloudantDB (or CouchDB) instance
Microsoft Bot Framework App
LUIS.ai App

Quickstart:

Install above prerequisites
Setup Environment Variables
Install Dependencies (Yarn)

Install prerequisites

Cloudant

Use docker (install docker CE for your operating system https://docs.docker.com/engine/installation/ if you haven't already) to create a local cloudant instance:

cd docker
docker-compose up

Microsoft Bot Framework

Login to https://dev.botframework.com/ with the AIE london credentials. Using the web console you can create a bot application to integrate with.

Luis

Luis is the intelligence behind the language processing and its where you will specify all your intents and entities are stored.

Set up environment variables

Create a .env file in the server folder and the ui folder. Copy the env variable keys from the example.env files. Ask a colleague for the defaults for these variables.

Install dependencies

Run, from the root folder of this project:

yarn bootstrap

Running using Bot Emulator

Install Bot Framework Emulator https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/bot-framework/debug-bots-emulator
Install https://ngrok.com, found at https://ngrok.com/download.
Run the bot from the command line using yarn start in the root of the project.
In Bot Framework Emulator enter "http://localhost:3978/api/messages" as endpoint and connect with credentials from your .env.
Say "Hi" in the emulator

Running using UI

This requires a development app in Microsoft bot framework and Luis
Run a tunnel for direct line to the Microsoft bot app
Run the bot from the command line using yarn start in the root of the project.
Say "Hi"

Notes

The Chat UI

The chat UI is only used for chatting to the production bots, not for use locally or developing. The Emulator will communicate with your server and provide everything you need to debug and develop.

The admin UI

The admin UI is used to configure the super chargers and it stores these things in the database which the server uses.

Lerna and Logging

Running yarn start from the root folder of this project runs yarn start in both ui and server projects but hides all the logs. If something goes wrong, you need to start the server up by:

cd server
yarn start

This will output the server logs to the console.

cyberplanner/workspace-chatbot

Yak