howdyai / botkit-starter-teams

Starting point for building a bot for Microsoft Teams

This repo is deprecated!

To get a fresh Botkit starter kit, use the Yeoman generator or remix a starter kit on Glitch

npm install -g yo generator-botkit
yo botkit

Botkit Starter Kit for Microsoft Teams Bots

This repo contains everything you need to get started building a Microsoft Teams bot with Botkit

Botkit is designed to ease the process of designing and running useful, creative bots that live inside messaging platforms. Bots are applications that can send and receive messages, and in many cases, appear alongside their human counterparts as users.

Some bots talk like people, others silently work in the background, while others present interfaces much like modern mobile applications. Botkit gives developers the necessary tools for building bots of any kind! It provides an easy-to-understand interface for sending and receiving messages so that developers can focus on creating novel applications and experiences instead of dealing with API endpoints.

Our goal with Botkit is to make bot building easy, fun, and accessible to anyone with the desire to create a future filled with talking machines!

What's Included

• Botkit core - a complete programming system for building conversational software
• Botkit for Microsoft Teams - extensions to Botkit to take advantage of Teams-specific features and APIs
• Pre-configured Express.js webserver including:
  • A customizable "Install my Bot" homepage
    • Webhook endpoints for communicating with platforms
• Sample skill modules that demonstrate various features of Botkit
• A sample "note taker" app that weaves together bot features, as well as:
  • A sample static tab
  • A sample configurable tab (along with sample settings pages)
  • A sample skill for responding to Compose Extensionqueries

Setup Botkit

Remix this project on Glitch

Deploy to Heroku

Clone this repository using Git:

git clone https://github.com/howdyai/botkit-starter-teams.git

Install dependencies, including Botkit:

cd botkit-starter-teams
npm install

Set up your Bot Framework profile and sideload your bot

To get everything up and running, you'll have to create an account and bot profile inside Microsoft's Bot Framework tool. You also need to create and "sideload" a application package. This is a multi-step process, but only takes a few minutes.

We have created a detailed step-by-step guide to setting up your bot for Teams in this provisioning guide.

Now comes the fun part of making your bot!

Extend This Starter kit

This starter kit is designed to provide developers a robust starting point for building a custom bot. Included in the code are a set of sample bot "skills" that illustrate various aspects of the Botkit SDK features. Once you are familiar with how Botkit works, you may safely delete all of the files in the skills/ subfolder.

Developers will build custom features as modules that live in the skills/ folder. The main bot application will automatically include any files placed there.

A skill module should be in the format:

module.exports = function(controller) {

    // add event handlers to controller
    // such as hears handlers that match triggers defined in code
    // or controller.studio.before, validate, and after which tie into triggers
    // defined in the Botkit Studio UI.

}

Customize Storage

By default, the starter kit uses a simple file-system based storage mechanism to record information about the teams and users that interact with the bot. While this is fine for development, or use by a single team, most developers will want to customize the code to use a real database system.

There are Botkit plugins for all the major database systems which can be enabled with just a few lines of code.

We have enabled our Mongo middleware for starters in this project. To use your own Mongo database, just fill out MONGO_URI in your .env file with the appropriate information. For tips on reading and writing to storage, check out these medium posts

Developer & Support Community

You can find full documentation for Botkit on our Docs site.

Need more help?

• Join our thriving community of Botkit developers and bot enthusiasts at large. Over 4500 members strong, our open teams group is the place for people interested in the art and science of making bots.

Come to ask questions, share your progress, and commune with your peers!

• We also host a regular meetup and annual conference called TALKABOT. Come meet and learn from other bot developers!

Full video of our 2016 event is available on Youtube.

About Botkit

Botkit is a product of Howdy and made in Austin, TX with the help of a worldwide community of botheads.

botkit-starter-teams's Issues

Teams not displaying the bot reply after some time

Hi,

I am not sure if this is an issue with botkit per say, but noticing an unexpected behavior while used with Microsoft Teams (With Slack, no such behavior observed).

I have a very basic Teams bot, exactly, as described at https://github.com/howdyai/botkit/blob/master/docs/readme-teams.md. I only added some console.log messages just before the bot replies.

The bot is hosted in AWS as an ECS service. It works fine for about an hour and a half. After that, Teams does not display the messages from the bot. I tried with bot the paid and developer versions of Microsoft Teams.

From the console messages I added, I can see that the bot is replying to the requests from Teams. If I restart the bot, the communication again works for next 1.5 hours.

Any clue on what might be happening?

Thanks!

add note tab

When I install the bot and try to open a tab with the add note functionality, I get this error:

Tunnel 24ae4157.ngrok.io not found

I'm assuming that uri is down? Just thought I should let you guys know. Also~ if anyone can point me to a basic botkit/teams "tab" example that would be great. I'm currently trying to find one...

Respond to private Conversation

Heya!

Is it possible to reply to a private conversation without having the whole message object?
Like respond only having userid and channelid? Or do I need any more info?

Thanks in advance!