Original Coast Clothing Instagram Experience

Original Coast Clothing (OC) is a fictional clothing brand created to showcase key features of the Instagram API. OC leverages key features to deliver a great customer experience. Using this demo as inspiration, you can create a delightful messaging experience that leverages both automation and live customer support. We are also providing the open source code of the app and a guide to deploy the experience on your local environment or remote server.

Try it now by messaging @originalcoastclothing or commenting on a post.

See the Developer Documentation on this experience.

Setting up your App

Requirements

• An Instagram Business Account
• A Facebook Page connected to that account
• A Facebook Developer Account that can perform Tasks on that Page
• A Facebook App with Basic settings configured

Setup Steps

1. Configure your Instagram integration by following the Getting Started documentation.
2. Add some testing Instagram accounts that you'll use to test the experience.

At this point you should have the following

• App ID
• App Secret
• Page ID
• Page Access Token
• Instagram Account connected to your Page
• Instagram Account(s) registered as test accounts

Installation

You will need:

• Node 10.x or higher
• A server for your code. Options include:
  • Remote server service such as Heroku or Glitch
  • Local tunneling service such as ngrok
  • Your own webserver

Usage

Using Click Deploy

You can automatically deploy this project to Heroku or Glitch with these buttons.

 

Once your server is configured and running, proceed to configuring your webhooks

Using ngrok

1. Install tunneling service

If not already installed, install ngrok via download or via command line:

npm install -g ngrok

In the directory of this repo, request a tunnel to your local server with your preferred port

ngrok http 3000

The screen should show the ngrok status:

Session Status                online
Account                       Redacted (Plan: Free)
Version                       2.3.35
Region                        United States (us)
Web Interface                 http://127.0.0.1:4040
Forwarding                    http://1c3b838deacb.ngrok.io -> http://localhost:3000
Forwarding                    https://1c3b838deacb.ngrok.io -> http://localhost:3000

Connections                   ttl     opn     rt1     rt5     p50     p90
                              0       0       0.00    0.00    0.00    0.00

Note the https URL of the external server that is fowarded to your local machine. In the above example, it is https://1c3b838deacb.ngrok.io.

2. Install the dependencies

Open a new terminal tab, also in the repo directiory.

$ npm install

Alternatively, you can use Yarn:

$ yarn install

3. Set up .env file

Copy the file .sample.env to .env

cp .sample.env .env

Edit the .env file to add all the values for your app and page.

4. Run your app locally

node app.js

You should now be able to access the application in your browser at http://localhost:3000

Confirm that you can also access it at the external URL from step 1, then proceed to configuring your webhooks.

Using Heroku

1. Install the Heroku CLI

Download and install the Heroku CLI

2. Create an app from the CLI

heroku apps:create
# Creating app... done, ⬢ mystic-wind-83
# Created http://mystic-wind-83.herokuapp.com/ | git@heroku.com:mystic-wind-83.git

Note the name given to your app. In this example, it was mystic-wind-83.

3. Set your environment variables

On the Heroku App Dashboard, find your app and set up the config vars following the comments in the file .sample.env

Alternatively, you can set env variables from the command line like this:

heroku config:set PAGE_ID=XXXX

4. Deploy the code

git push heroku main

5. View log output

heroku logs --tail

If you can reach your server at the url from Step 2, proceed to configuring your webhooks.

Configure your webhooks

Now that your server is running, your webhook endpoint is at the path /webhook. In the Heroku example above, this would be http://mystic-wind-83.herokuapp.com/webhook.

Set up your webhooks by following the Instagram Webhook documentation and subscribe to the messages, messaging_postbacks, and comments webhooks.

Test that your app setup is successful

Log in to Instagram as one of the test accounts you added above. Try sending a message to the Instagram account connected to your Page.

You should see the webhook called in the ngrok terminal tab, and in your application terminal tab.

If you see a response to your message in messenger, you have fully set up your app! Voilà!

License

Sample Instagram App Original Coast Clothing is BSD licensed, as found in the LICENSE file.

See the CONTRIBUTING file for how to help out.