Botkit is the most popular open-source toolkit for creating bots today. It 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.
GOAL: Create a Bot running on your laptop, that responds to a simple “hello” command. Then we will expand that basic script to do more things.
More info: https://botkit.ai
Webhooks The Botkit code checks for the presence of a webhook and creates one if it’s not there. Example of a webhook message:
As you can see it creates a “Firehose” webhook, that means the webhook is triggered with every action: resource=all + event=all (as shown in "Webhooks Explained")
NOTE: The webhook is created using the Bot’s token so you will not see it when listing your webhooks.
- Login to the developer.ciscospark.com page, login with your Cisco Spark account and click webhooks / create webhooks
- On the line with ‘Authorization’, replace your token with the Bot’s token:
- You can also use this to list webhooks.