/botkit-webex-samples

Chatbot samples for Webex Teams built with Botkit

Primary LanguageJavaScriptMIT LicenseMIT

Botkit samples for Webex Teams

This community project driven regroups:

  • Webex Teams bot samples built with Howdy's Botkit
  • A template to quickly bootstrap your Botkit / Webex Teams bot project (updated for Botkit 4.5)
  • An experimental websocket usage example

We suggest you start with the HelloWorld bot sample below.

New to Botkit?

New to Webex Teams?

Hello World (bot command)

Simplest bot you can code: echo a message plus the Webex Teams user name that mentioned the bot:

hello-bot-direct

And don't forget to @mention the bot in group spaces:

hello-bot-group

Note that the bot will respond to anyone mentioning it, which means it can chat with other bots!

hello-bot-playing

Assuming your bot is accessible from the internet or you exposed it via a tunneling tool such as ngrok, you can run any sample in a jiffy:

How to run helloworld.js

ngrok helps you expose the bot running on your laptop to the internet, type: ngrok http 8080 to launch

From a Mac/Linux terminal window, type:

git clone https://github.com/CiscoDevNet/botkit-webex-samples
cd botkit-webex-samples
npm install
ACCESS_TOKEN=0123456789abcdef PUBLIC_URL=https://abcdef.ngrok.io node helloworld.js

From a Windows CMD shell, type:

git clone https://github.com/CiscoDevNet/botkit-webex-samples
cd botkit-webex-samples
npm install
set ACCESS_TOKEN=0123456789abcdef
set PUBLIC_URL=https://abcdef.ngrok.io
set SECRET=not that secret
node helloworld.js

where:

  • ACCESS_TOKEN is the API access token of your Webex Teams bot
  • PUBLIC_URL is the root URL at which the Webex Cloud platform can reach your bot

Bootstrap a Botkit project for Webex Teams (template)

The template regroups a set of best practices:

  • configuration: pass settings either through environment variables on the command line, or by hardcoding some of them in the .env file. Note that env variable are priorized over the envfile if values are found in both places.
  • healthcheck: check if everything is going well by hitting the ping endpoint exposed automatically.
  • skills: organize your bot behaviours by placing 'hear commands', 'convos' and 'events' in the skills directory. The bot comes with a ".commons", "help", "fallback" and "welcome" skills.

Conversations demo bot (convos)

A conversational bot that illustrates Botkit conversation system through examples. The bot is built with the template provided in this repo.

You can test the bot live by inviting convos@sparkbot.io to a Webex Teams's space.

convos

DevNet events (external api invocation)

This bot illustrates how you can create conversations, and uses a wrapper to an external API hosted on Heroku that lists current and upcoming events at DevNet.

devnet-Botkit

Emoji (websocket)

This bot turns emoji tags to unicode characters and posts back the 'emojified' phrase

The bot leverages the experimental websocket library for Webex Teams, so that you don't need to register a Webhook and expose your bot on the internet.

From a Mac/Linux bash shell, type:

> npm install
> ACCESS_TOKEN=0123456789abcdef node emoji.js

From a Windows shell, type:

> npm install
> set ACCESS_TOKEN=0123456789abcdef
> node emoji.js

emoji