XState-Chatbot

XState-Chatbot is a chatbot developed on the technology XState. XState is a JavaScript implementation of the concept of State-Charts.

Please refer to LOCALSETUP.md to guide you through local setup.

Each sub-project nodejs and react-app has it's separate README.

Chatbot is developed as a backend service that will receive messages incoming from the user, and send messages to the user using a separate api call.

In this project, the nodejs directory contains the primary project. It contains all the files of the project that will get deployed on the server. react-app is provided only to ease the process of dialog development. It should be used only on a developer's local machine when developing any new chat flow. nodejs should be run as a backend service and tested once on the local machine using postman before deploying the build to the server.

Modifying the Dialog

The Xstate Machine that contains the dialog is present in nodejs/src/machine/. To modify the dialog, please make changes to those file.

Modifying messages without any change to dislog flow could be handled by just modifying the files in messages directory.

Any external api calls are written as part of files present in nodejs/src/machine/service which would get called from the state machine.

Environment Variables

Environment Variables can configured as present in the env-variables.js.

Some of the environment variables and their usage is listed below:

1. WHATSAPP_PROVIDER: To configure the WhatsApp Provider. You can take kaleyra.js as a reference implementation. console is a provider which could be used to test the project on a developer's locale machine to test the changes.
2. REPO_PROVIDER: It can be used to configure the datastore for state management between consecutive messages from a user. InMemory datastore can be used to kick-off chatbot development. PsotgreSQL should be used in production environment.
3. SERVICE_PROVIDER: To ease the dialog development without relying on any backend services, this value could be set to Dummy. In production environment it should NOT be set to Dummy. The services are defined in service directory. Which service gets loaded at runtime is defined in service-loader.js

Remote Debugging

To support remote debugging, we recommend using VSCode. The VSCode launch script file is written which will be used to start the remote debugging session.

Steps to start a remote debugging session:

1. Port forward to the the remote server (9229:9229)
2. In VSCode Run options, select "Attach to remote"
3. Start Debugging