Tinode Chatbot Example

This is a rudimentary chatbot for Tinode using gRPC API. It's written in Python as a demonstration that the API is language-independent.

The chat bot subscribes to events stream using Plugin API and logs in as 'Tino the Chatbot' user. The event stream API is used to listen for new accounts. When a new account is created, the bot initiates a p2p topic with the new user. Then it listens for messages sent to the topic and responds to each with a random quote from quotes.txt file.

Generated files are provided for convenience in a separate folder. You may re-generate them if needed:

python -m grpc_tools.protoc -I../pbx --python_out=. --grpc_python_out=. ../pbx/model.proto

Installing and running

Using Docker

1. Follow instructions to build and run dockerized Tinode chat server up to an including step 4.

2. In the step 5 add the following parameter to the command line: --volume botdata:/botdata. It will create and mount a volume botdata where Tino's (chatbot's) credentials are stored.

   docker run --rm --name tinode-init-db --network tinode-net --volume botdata:/botdata tinode-init-db
   

3. Follow step 6 to build the Tinode server.

4. Run the server adding --env PLUGIN_PYTHON_CHAT_BOT_ENABLED=true to the command line:

   $ docker run -p 6060:18080 -d --name tinode-srv --env PLUGIN_PYTHON_CHAT_BOT_ENABLED=true --network tinode-net tinode-srv
   

5. If current folder is chat/chatbot, then the Dockerfile is located in chat/docker/chatbot folder; cd ../docker and build the chat bot image

   $ docker build --tag=tinode-bot chatbot
   

6. Run the chatbot

   $ docker run -d --name tinode-bot --network tinode-net --volume botdata:/botdata tinode-bot
   

7. Test that the bot is functional by pointing your browser to http://localhost:6060/x/, login and talk to user Tino. The user should respond to every message with a random quote.

Building from Source

Make sure python 2.7 or 3.4 or higher is installed. Make sure pip 9.0.1 or higher is installed. If you are using python 2.7 install futures:

pip install futures

Follow instructions to install grpc. The package is called grpcio (not grpc!):

pip install grpcio

Start the tinode server first. Then start the chatbot with credentials of the user you want to be your bot, alice in this example:

python chatbot.py --login-basic=alice:alice123

If you want to run the bot in the background, start it as

nohup python chatbot.py --login-basic=alice:alice123 &

Run python chatbot.py -h for more options.

If you are using python 2.7, keep in mind that condition.wait() is forever buggy. As a consequence of this bug the bot cannot be terminated with a SIGINT. It has to be stopped with a SIGKILL.

You can use cookie file to store credentials. Sample cookie files are provided as basic-cookie.sample and token-cookie.sample. Once authenticated the bot will attempt to store the token in the cookie file, .tn-cookie by default. If you have a cookie file with the default name, you can run the bot with no parameters:

python chatbot.py

Quotes are read from quotes.txt by default. The file is plain text with one quote per line.