SmoochBot + Wit.ai

A Smooch bot that integrates with Wit.ai

Prerequisites

1. First, sign up for a free account at smooch.io

2. With a new Smooch app created, go to the settings tab and take note of your App Token. Also, generate a new Secret Key, and take note of the key ID and secret.

3. Sign up for an account at wit.ai

Getting started

To install dependencies:

$ npm install

In order to configure your application you will need to grab your Smooch API key + token and the wit.ai token (taken from the first steps) to set those as environment variables. In order to test the webhook functionality locally you will need to install ngrok.

Download ngrok and follow the installation instructions to set it up and configure it. To set up the tunnel you will need to run the following:

ngrok http 8445

This will create an ngrok.io URL for you to use to set the following environment variables:

export SMOOCH_APP_TOKEN=xxxx
export SMOOCH_KEY_ID=xxxx
export SMOOCH_SECRET=xxxx
export WIT_TOKEN=xxxx
export SERVICE_URL=http://6a72fa86.ngrok.io

Start the app:

$ npm start

To test the app either visit the ngrok.io URL or http://localhost:8445 (the default port).

Deploying to Heroku

1. Deploy your app to Heroku using the button below. You'll need to specify your app token, key ID, and secret in the app's SMOOCH_APP_TOKEN, SMOOCH_KEY_ID, SMOOCH_SECRET and WIT_TOKEN config settings.

   

2. Your app should now be running on Heroku but you're not quite done yet. Take note of the URL where your heroku app is running, for example https://foo-bar-4242.herokuapp.com. You'll need to specify this in your heroku app SERVICE_URL config variable. You can do this in the Heroku control panel under Settings > Config Variables, or if you have the Heroku Toolbelt installed you can do it like so:

    $ heroku config:set SERVICE_URL=https://foo-bar-4242.herokuapp.com -a foo-bar-4242
   

3. You may need to restart your application for the webhook to be registered.

4. You should be all set. Open your Heroku app and start chatting with your new bot!

Troubleshooting your bot

Is your bot misbehaving? Not working? Here are some steps you can follow to figure out what's going wrong.

Warning: command line instructions incoming. You may not be accustomed to using the command line but don't worry, it's much easier than you think.

Check your bot's logs on heroku

If there's a bug in your code, checking the heroku logs is the best way to figure out what's going wrong. Here's how:

1. Install the heroku toolbelt: https://toolbelt.heroku.com/ These are power tools that let you do a lot more than what Heroku dashboard alone allows.

2. Next, open your preferred terminal app. On OSX the default Terminal app will work fine here.

3. Log in to the heroku toolbelt with the following command:

    heroku login
   

   If the command heroku isn't found, try restarting your terminal app. Once logged in you should be able to list all of your heroku apps like so:

    heroku apps
   

   which should give you something like this:

    $ heroku apps
    === My Apps
    your-app
   

4. Now you can check the logs of your heroku app like so:

    heroku logs -a your-app
   

How do I deploy my fixes to Heroku?

1. To deploy using git you first have to download a copy of your heroku app's code, like so:

    git clone https://github.com/your-github-username/your-app
   

   Note that git will prompt you to enter your github credentials.

2. This will create a new git copy of your code in a new folder. You can go into that folder like so:

    cd your-app
   

3. Now you can use the heroku toolbelt to link this git copy up to your heroku app with the following command:

    heroku git:remote -a your-app
   

4. Once that's done, you can now deploy to heroku directly from this directory. If you've made any fixes on github directly, be sure to sync them here like so:

    git pull origin master
    git push heroku master
   

5. You can also make changes to your local copy of the code. To do this, edit whatever file you wish in your preferred text editor, and then commit and push them up to github. You'll add a commit message, which is a short sentence decribing what you changed.

    git commit -a -m 'Your commit message'
    git push origin master
   

   Then, you can deploy those changes to heroku in the same way:

    git push heroku master