Messenger-Bot: A Node Client for the Facebook Messenger Platform | Hacker News Reader

Messenger-Bot: A Node Client for the Facebook Messenger Platform

github.com

28 pointsguifortaine9 comments

Perfect! This looks great. I'm looking forward to try it. I've had a lot of trouble getting through Facebook's process of actually setting up a messenger bot even just for a hello world/test example. I think there will be some great things built in the future given the size of Facebook's user base.

Nice, I've been working on this wrapper for the Send API: https://www.npmjs.com/package/fb-messenger

did you have to use a public cert to get that webhook to work?

I'm using localtunnel for the time being to develop fast but I'm sure Lets Encrypt would work for the webhook.

It would be nice if we don't have a bunch of bot kits and instead converge on one.

I appreciate the package author putting this together but with Botkit as well... I don't know. That's frustrating dealing with multiple APIs. Botkit is adding support for Facebook too.

Would be nice to have one. https://github.com/howdyai/botkit

Heh, I saw that Botkit had added Facebook support pretty much right after I released messenger-bot a couple days ago. I probably wouldn't have bothered making this library if I had seen it before.

However, I do think messenger-bot serves a slightly different purpose than Botkit might. messenger-bot is mostly just a library over the Messenger platform, with some events and convenience functions. Botkit is a bit higher level though, since it includes extras like conversation sessions, pattern matching on messages, etc.

I think both libraries have their upsides and downsides, depending on the use case. Up to the author to choose what's best for them!

Hey! I'm the creator of this package; nice to see it on HN. If anyone has any questions or feedback, let me know. :-)

How likely is facebook to block it?

Only if Facebook shuts down their Messenger Platform! https://developers.facebook.com/docs/messenger-platform They just recently launched it at their F8 developer conference.

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