MS Bot Builder SDK for Node.js

Get started: this is my take on the documentation here

Prerequisites

• Node

Get started

Assuming you have already installed Node.js, make a folder for the bot, use the following in a terminal to get started:

mkdir bottington #srs call it whatever you like
cd botting*
touch index.js
npm init -y

Open up the index.js file and copy pasta this code into it:

const restify = require('restify')
const builder = require('botbuilder')

// Setup Restify Server
const server = restify.createServer()
server.listen(process.env.port || process.env.PORT || 3978, () => {
  console.log('%s listening to %s', server.name, server.url)
})

// Create chat connector for communicating with the Bot Framework Service
const connector = new builder.ChatConnector({
  appId: process.env.MICROSOFT_APP_ID,
  appPassword: process.env.MICROSOFT_APP_PASSWORD
})

// Listen for messages from users
server.post('/api/messages', connector.listen())

// Receive messages from the user and respond by echoing each message back (prefixed with 'You said:')
const bot = new builder.UniversalBot(connector, session => {
  session.send('You said: %s', session.message.text)
})

Install the dependencies for the bot, from the terminal:

npm i botbuilder
npm i restify

Add an npm script into the package.json file:

  "scripts": {
    "start": "node index.js"
  },

Then start the bot with npm start, you should see the restify output and that's your bot running locally.

Bot Framework Emulator

Now your bot is running locally but how do you work with it? Microsoft have made us an emulator, you'll need to download it from here and install it. Once installed you'll also need to install ngrok for tunneling, so npm i -g ngrok and we're good to go.

Take a note of the npm output for the install location of ngrok as we'll need the install location for the emulator settings, in the emulator add the ngrok path to the App Settings section of the emulator.

So now get the local host endpoint and enter it into the emulators address bar, and click CONNECT then enter some text into the emulator, the bot should repeat what you have just typed.