Connecting to Messaging and Voice Channels

Connecting to A Channel

Learn how to make your assistant available on:

• Your Own Website

• Facebook Messenger

• Slack

• Telegram

• Twilio

• Microsoft Bot Framework

• Cisco Webex Teams

• RocketChat

• Mattermost

• Google Hangouts Chat

• Custom Connectors

Testing Channels on Your Local Machine

If you're running a Rasa server on localhost, most external channels won't be able to find your server URL, since localhost is not open to the internet.

To make a port on your local machine publicly available on the internet, you can use ngrok. Alternatively, see this list tracking and comparing other tunneling solutions.

After installing ngrok, run:

ngrok http 5005; rasa run

When you follow the instructions to make your assistant available on a channel, use the ngrok URL. Specifically, wherever the instructions say to use https://<host>:<port>/webhooks/<CHANNEL>/webhook, use <ngrok_url>/webhooks/<CHANNEL>/webhook, replacing <ngrok_url> with the randomly generated URL displayed in your ngrok terminal window. For example, if connecting your bot to Slack, your URL should resemble https://26e7e7744191.ngrok.io/webhooks/slack/webhook.

caution

With the free-tier of ngrok, you can run into limits on how many connections you can make per minute. As of writing this, it is set to 40 connections / minute.

Alternatively you can make your assistant listen on a specific address using the -i command line option:

rasa run -p 5005 -i 192.168.69.150

This is particularly useful when your internet facing machines connect to backend servers using a VPN interface.