facebookTemplate

Create a Facebook App and Page

The next step is to create an app and a page on Facebook. There is good documentation available from Facebook but you'll walk through the main steps here.

To create the app go here and

• click on My Apps -> Add a New App and enter a name
• you will be redirected to the dashboard for the app
• under Products, find Add a Product and click on Messenger -> Set Up

To create the page, you have to:

• go the settings for Messenger, scroll down to Token Generation and click on the link to create a new page for your app

Once you have created a page, go back to the Token Generation settings and select this page from the drop-down menu. Copy the Page - Access Token into the placeholder for PAGE_ACCESS_TOKEN in config.json. Set the VERIFY_TOKEN in the config.json to any random string.

Set up the webhook

Finally, you need to register your webhook on the Facebook developers page.

• Go to the Messenger tab in Products again and scroll down to Webhooks, click on Setup Webhooks
• Under the Callback URL enter the url where you are running your app. If you are running your app on localhost you can use ngrok to generate a public url for example, https://43b6b3fa.ngrok.io/webhook. It is important that your flask app is running at this point, because the verify_token() will be called on the next step.
• In the Verify Token field, you put the value you specified in your config.json file.
• In Subscription Fields make sure messages and messaging_postbacks are ticked Click Verify and Save to perform the authentication.

Connect to your deployed bot

You can configure BotID, LanguageCode, MessageType, ResponseType, refreshToken in config.json.

{
    "BotID": "<BotId>",
    "IdToken": "<IdToken>",
    "LanguageCode": "English",
    "MessageType": "text",
    "PAGE_ACCESS_TOKEN": "<PAGE_ACCESS_TOKEN>",
    "ResponseType": "text",
    "VERIFY_TOKEN": "random string",
    "refreshToken": "<refresh_token>"
}

BotID and the refreshToken are provided to you in the Botlhale NLP Toolkit.