Introduction

If you don't have few hundreds users for load-testing your alpha-version of Facebook chat-bot application, the application might be helpful for you. Especially for kind of applications like quiz, poll, etc.

How it works ?

The application can imitate Facebook in very simple way.

Your chat-bot app sends requests to the app.

And if you need, the app sends requests in response.

So you need:

1. write config.json like this config.sample.json
2. run binary $ fb-chat-emulator for your config
3. change Facebook URL in your app to the app URL, for example:

# URL_BASE = “https://graph.facebook.com/v2.6/me/”
URL_BASE = “http://127.0.0.1:8877/”

4. create test users into your app
5. and test it

Configuration

In a config file you can set:

AppURL - base URL to your chat-bot app.

Facebook spends some time to work our requests so you can set the time between RequestTimeMin and RequestTimeMax ms.

Users spend some time to respond - from ResponsePauseMin to ResponsePauseMax ms.

By using Rules you can describe some reaction. For example, chat-bot app sends a question for a user (say during some quiz):

POST https://graph.facebook.com/v2.6/me/messages
{"message": {"attachment": {"type": "template", ... "title": "What is AppURL parameter above?"}}, "recipient": {"id": "***************"}}

so we can describe it as

"Request": {
    "Name": "question#1",
    "URL": "/messages",
    "BodySegment": "What is AppURL parameter above?"
}

there Name need only for readable statistic.

And if right answer is It is address of your app server our Response would be like this:

"Response": {
    "URL": "/fb-bot/",
    "Body": "{'entry': [{'messaging': [{'timestamp': [timestamp], 'postback': {'payload': 'question:10', 'title': 'It is address of your app server'}, 'recipient': {'id': 1234567890}, 'sender': {'id': [RecipientId]}}]}]}"
}

and it's a full rule:

{
    "Request": {
        "Name": "question#1",
        "URL": "/messages",
        "BodySegment": "What is AppURL parameter above?"
    },
    "Response": {
        "URL": "/fb-bot/",
        "Body": "{'entry': [{'messaging': [{'timestamp': [timestamp], 'postback': {'payload': 'question:10', 'title': 'It is address of your app server'}, 'recipient': {'id': 1234567890}, 'sender': {'id': [RecipientId]}}]}]}"
    }
}

You can write empty Response then the app won't send any response but will write statistic for the requests.

Templates

As you could see in examples above you can use some template-variables in config.

[timestamp] - it's replaced by current timestamp for response body

[RecipientId] - it gets from request body

Statistics

You can watch realtime statistic during testing process in your browser http://127.0.0.1:8877/stat.

And reset it between tests http://127.0.0.1:8877/reset.

It looks like this:

+------------+-----------+------------+--------------+-----------------+---------------+--------------+----------------+---------------+
|    NAME    | REQ COUNT | RESP COUNT | RESP NET ERR | RESP STATUS ERR | FIRST REQUEST | LAST REQUEST | FIRST RESPONSE | LAST RESPONSE |
+------------+-----------+------------+--------------+-----------------+---------------+--------------+----------------+---------------+
| greetings  |       100 |          0 |            0 |               0 | 12:42:00.513  | 12:42:01.977 | 00:00:00.000   | 00:00:00.000  |
| question#1 |       100 |        100 |            0 |               0 | 12:42:26.805  | 12:42:28.285 | 12:42:28.261   | 12:42:32.915  |
| question#2 |       100 |        100 |            0 |               0 | 12:42:48.154  | 12:42:49.408 | 12:42:49.501   | 12:42:54.147  |
| question#3 |       100 |        100 |            0 |               0 | 12:43:11.119  | 12:43:12.327 | 12:43:12.592   | 12:43:16.970  |
| OTHERS     |      2525 |          0 |            0 |               0 | 12:42:09.003  | 12:43:49.505 | 00:00:00.000   | 00:00:00.000  |
+------------+-----------+------------+--------------+-----------------+---------------+--------------+----------------+---------------+

By the way, thanks olekukonko for the great library tablewriter !

Flags

If you want to change app port or path to config or say to enable debug mode you should use flags.

By the way, Debug mode can help you to find out what exactly do you send to Facebook.

Use $ fb-chat-emulator --help for more information.

Releases

You can build your own binary by using go tools or use prepared builds there https://github.com/ss-dev/fb-chat-emulator/releases