Create and Deploy a Chat Bot to AWS Lambda in Five Minutes

This is a guest post by Gojko Adzic, creator of ClaudiaJS

The new Claudia.JS Bot Builder project helps JavaScript developers to easily create chat-bots for Facebook, Telegram, Skype, and Slack, and deploy them to AWS Lambda and Amazon API Gateway in minutes.

The key idea behind this project is to remove all the boilerplate code and common infrastructure tasks, so you can focus on writing the really important part of the bot — your business workflows. Everything else is handled by the Claudia Bot Builder.

The Claudia Bot Builder library simplifies messaging workflows, automatically sets up the correct web hooks, and guides you through configuration steps, so you don’t have to research individual implementation protocols. It automatically converts the incoming messages from various platforms into a common format, so you can handle them easily. It also automatically packages the responses into the correct templates, so you do not have to worry about different message response formats. This means that you can write and deploy a single bot with just a few lines of code, and operate it on various bot platforms using AWS Lambda. Check out the two-minute video Create chat-bots easily using Claudia Bot Builder to see how easy it is to set up a bot on AWS using the new tool.

Here’s a simple example:

Prerequisites

The Claudia Bot Builder works with the Node.JS 4.3.2 AWS Lambda installation. It requires using the Claudia.JS deployment tool, which you can install using NPM:

npm install claudia -g

If you already have Claudia installed, make sure it’s up to date. The Claudia Bot Builder support requires version 1.4.0 or later.

Creating a simple text bot

First, create an empty folder, and a new NPM project inside it. Make sure to give it a descriptive name:

npm init

Then, add the claudia-bot-builder library as a project dependency:

npm install claudia-bot-builder -S

For this particular bot, generate some dynamic content using the huh excuse generator. Add that as a project dependency:

npm install huh -S

Now create the bot. Create a file called bot.js and paste the following content:

var botBuilder = require('claudia-bot-builder'),
    excuse = require('huh');

module.exports = botBuilder(function (request) {
  return 'Thanks for sending ' + request.text  + 
      '. Your message is very important to us, but ' + 
      excuse.get();
});

That’s pretty much it. You can now deploy the bot to AWS and configure it for Facebook Messenger, by using Claudia:

claudia create --region us-east-1 --api-module bot --configure-fb-bot

Now would be a good time to configure a new Facebook page and a messenger application, as explained in the Facebook Messenger Getting Started Guide. The bot installer prints the web hook URL and the verification token, which you can copy to your Facebook Messenger configuration page. You can then generate the page access token from Facebook. Copy that back to Claudia when asked, and you’re almost done.

In a few moments, your bot will be live, and you can talk to it from the page you created. That was easy, wasn’t it?

If you’d like other Facebook users to talk to it as well, submit it for application review from the Facebook App Developer page.

Deploying to other platforms

The Claudia Bot Builder can also help you set up this bot for all the other platforms. Just run claudia update and provide the additional configuration option:

• For Slack slash commands, use –configure-slack-slash-command
• For Skype, use –configure-skype-bot
• For Telegram, use –configure-telegram-bot

More complex workflows

The example bot just responds with silly excuses so for homework, do something more interesting with it.

The request object passed into the message handling function contains the entire message in the text field, but it also has some other pieces of data for more complex work. The sender field identifies the user sending the message, so you can create threads of continuity and sessions. The type field contains the identifier of the bot endpoint that received the message (for example, skype or facebook) so you can respond differently to different bot systems. The originalRequest field contains the entire unparsed original message, so you can handle platform-specific requests and go beyond simple text.

For examples, check out:

• Fact Bot, which looks up facts about topics on WikiData and creates Facebook Messenger menus.
• Space Explorer Bot, A small FB Messenger chat bot using NASA API

Although it’s enough just to return a string value for simple cases, and the Bot Builder packages it correctly for individual bot engines, you can return a more complex object and get platform-specific features, for example, Facebook buttons. In that case, make sure to use the type field of the request to decide on additional features.

For asynchronous workflows, send back a Promise object, and resolve it with the response later. The convention is the same: if the promise gets resolved with a string, the Claudia Bot Builder automatically packages it into the correct template based on the bot endpoint that received a message. Reply with an object instead of a string, and the Bot Builder will not do any specific parsing, letting you take advantage of more advanced bot features for individual platforms. Remember to configure your Lambda function for longer execution if you plan to use asynchronous replies; by default, AWS limits this to 3 seconds.

Try it out live

You can see this bot in action and play with it live from the GitHub Claudia Examples repository.

More information

For more information on the Claudia Bot Builder, and some nice example projects, check out the Claudia Bot Builder GitHub project repository. For questions and suggestions, visit the Claudia project chat room on Gitter.