Python Messenger Bot Repository

Inspiration

Despite being the second most popular programming language, Python barely has half as many tools and tutorials that NodeJS has. With our repository, we offer ready to deploy messenger bot templates as well as instructions on how to build-upon and utilise them.

What it does

Our WebApp contains working e-commerce messenger bots with click-to-deploy functionality together with their code and instructions on how to deploy them on different platforms. Using our click-to-deploy button to deploy one of our templates should take around 5 minutes from click to working bot. All bot templates are open source and have NLP functionality that can be easily extended.

Our web app also has well written documentation on the different aspects of making a bot including sending templates, text and buttons, handling incoming text and button responses from users and implementing NLP for understanding user input.

How I built it

All the templates have been built using python and flask and are hosted on Heroku. Their click to deploy buttons clone the bots from GitHub and automatically host them on Heroku plus we also have instructions on how to host and run the bots locally using ngrok. The click to deploy buttons have been built using the heroku API and some of the tutorials have been written in markdown and hosted on GitHub.

Challenges I ran into

Building the click-to-deploy buttons was definitely the most difficult part of the whole process as it involved the automatic installation of a variety of python libraries after deployment. Writing instructions that would be relevant to as many different skill levels of developers was also a challenge.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We have created what could possibly be the most helpful product a Python developer working on messenger bots could need and we tried to put as many features into our templates as possible.

What I learned

From working on this project I have been able to create instructions that cater to many different levels of developers as well as write as clean and efficient code as possible.

What's next for Python Messenger Bot Repository

In the future, we hope for our repository become the number one source of templates to developers by hosting hundreds of different bots regardless of platform, all of which will be open-source, easy to deploy and should contain easy to follow instructions on how to modify them.