With AWS Lambda

Install and Run

Download this example or clone bottender.

curl https://codeload.github.com/Yoctol/bottender/tar.gz/master | tar -xz --strip=2 bottender-master/examples/with-aws-lambda
cd with-aws-lambda

or use npx serverless to create your project:

npx serverless install --url https://github.com/Yoctol/bottender/tree/master/examples/with-aws-lambda -n <PORJECT_NAME>
cd <PROJECT_NAME>

Install dependencies:

npm install

This is an example that runs on Facebook Messenger Platform. Therefore, you must fill MESSENGER_APP_ID, MESSENGER_APP_SECRET, MESSENGER_PAGE_ID, MESSENGER_ACCESS_TOKEN, and MESSENGER_VERIFY_TOKEN in your .env file.

If you are not familiar with Messenger Bot, you may refer to Bottender's doc, Messenger Setup, to find detailed instructions.

Deploy on AWS

Next, you must deploy the bot on AWS Lambda as a serverless function and use AWS API Gateway as the endpoint for Webhook.

However, deploying our serverless bot function manually using an API Gateway and AWS Lambda can be a tedious job. Thus, we can utilize a tool named Serverless Framework to deploy our app.

We first use npm to install the tool globally by running the command:

npm install -g serverless

After finishing the installation, we must set the AWS access and secret keys by the command:

serverless config credentials --provider aws --key ACCESS_KEY ?secret SECRET_KEY

Finally, we can easily deploy our app using the command:

serverless deploy

This command will deploy our app on AWS Lambda and API Gateway using the serverless.yml file. It will take some time to complete the deployment. If you deploy successfully, you should see output like:

endpoints:
  ANY - https://xxxxxxxxx.execute-api.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/dev/
  ANY - https://xxxxxxxxx.execute-api.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/dev/{proxy+}

Set Webhook

To set the webhook, we must go to the Developers Console of the Facebook Messenger Platform and use the endpoints we get to set the webhook. Don't forget to add webhooks/messenger at the end of the endpoint string. For example, here we must use https://xxxxxxxxx.execute-api.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/dev/webhooks/messenger as our webhook.

Idea of This Example

This example is a bot running on Messenger and deployed on AWS Lambda and API Gateway. The bot deployed on a serverless service such as AWS Lambda should not store session locally since the serverless service can not maintain the state.