RingCentral chatbot framework for JavaScript

Philosophy

Let developers focus on business logic instead of RingCentral/Glip Platform implementation details

Supported features

Bot token management
Bot WebHook management
Remove & re-add bot
Deploy to AWS Lambda
Update bot name and avatar
Bot join & leave group

Quick Start tutorials

If you want to create a Glip chatbot and deploy it to your own server
- read this tutorial
If you want to create a Glip chatbot and deploy it to AWS Lambda
- read this tutorial

We recommend you to finish reading/watching at least one of the tutorials above before reading on.

Create a RingCentral app

Click the link below to create a RingCentral app quickly:

Create Bot App

Do remember to change redirect uri from https://<chatbot-server>/bot/oauth to the real uri. If you don't have a public uri, leave that field blank.

Setup database

The first time you setup the bot, the database is empty, you need to create tables.

There is an easy way:

curl -X PUT -u admin:password https://<bot-server>/admin/setup-database

Migrate database

If you update the SDK from an early version, it might not work because the database schema has changed.

In such case, you can migrate the database:

curl -X PUT -u admin:password https://<bot-server>/admin/migrate-database

This command will smartly check your database and add new fields/tables if necessary.

Maintain

"Maintain" is useful in the following cases:

If for reason bot server changed, you need to re-setup WebHooks
You bot server was down for quite a while and your WebHooks have been blacklisted
There is orphan data in database

You can "maintain" to resolve the issues above:

curl -X PUT -u admin:password https://<bot-server>/admin/maintain

It is recommended that you create a cron job to run this command daily.

Diagnostic

Sometimes there are issues and you don't know what happened. This framework provides interfaces for diagnostic:

curl -X GET -u admin:password https://<bot-server>/admin/dump-database
curl -X GET -u admin:password https://<bot-server>/admin/list-subscriptions

To enable verbose logging, please define environment variable RC_VERBOSE_LOGGING with string value "true".

Update token

curl -X PUT -u admin:password https://<bot-server>/admin/update-token?id=<bot-extension-id>&token=access-token'

Hidden commands

The following commands are considered "hidden" or "easter eggs":

__rename__ <newName>: rename bot to newName
__updateToken__ <access_token>: update bot access token to access_token
A message with text __setAvatar__ and an attached image file: set bot avatar to the attached image

Advanced topics

About graduation

In order to graduate a RingCentral app, you need to invoke each API endpoint used in your app at least 5 times.

In order to to meet this requirement quickly, you can invoke API endpoints explicitly in code, for example:

await bot.rc.get('/restapi/v1.0/account/~/extension/~')

Advanced Demo bots

Glip Crontab Chatbot
- Allow Glip users to create cron jobs to send notifications
- Try it
- By reading its source code, you will get how to handle messages from users and how to reply.
Glip RC Assistant Chatbot
- Allow Glip users to query/edit their RingCentral data via Glip.
- Try it
- It is a demo for integrating Glip chatbot with RingCentral platform.
Glip Google Drive Chatbot
- Allow Glip users to monitor their Google Drive events.
- Try it
- It is a demo for integrating Glip chatbot with a third party service (Google Drive)
- It is also a demo for chatbot skills

Notes

AWS Lambda connects AWS RDS issue
- If you create an RDS manually and let it create a new security group for you.
  - By default, the security group only allows inbound traffic from your current laptop's public IP address
  - AWS Lambda by default cannot access the newly created AWS RDS
  - We need to update security group to allow inbound traffic from 0.0.0.0/0
AWS Lambda and await issue
- AWS Lambda is stateless and it won't keep a background runner
- So if your code is async, DO remember to await. Otherwise that code will not be executed before Lambda invocation terminates
- I forgot to await, a weird phenomenon was: whenever I issued a command, I always got reply of previous command
AWS Lambda global code dead-lock issue
- Do NOT invoke lambda functions in global code outside of handlers
- I tried once and it seemed to case dead-lock. Lots of requests which causes 429 error and database connection exhausted
  - In global code I did axio.put('https://<bot-server>/admin/maintain') and it caused dead-lock

Todo

send api to change presence, let bot user to be online