Deploying a Bot to AWS Lambda

This guide will take you through the process of deploying and hosting your bot on AWS Lambda. We recommend you do the following prior to reading this guide:

1. Successful test your bot locally using the instructions in our Getting Started Guide.
2. Familiarize yourself with our recommended project structure.

When you are ready, Let's begin.

Install dependencies

To get started let's add some key dependencies to our project.

yarn add ringcentral-chatbot serverless-http pg
yarn add --dev serverless

• We installed pg because we choose to use PostgreSQL as our database in this example, but you are welcome to use any database you wish.

• We use serverless-http to use Express.js code in AWS Lambda so that we can reuse code between Express.js and AWS Lambda.

• We use serverless framework to help us deploy the project to AWS with ease.

Code the Bot

Nothing requires you to structure your project according to our recommendation. In the example below we encapsulate our entire bot in a single file lambda.js to more easily illustrate AWS deployment.

Create and edit a file called lambda.js with the following content:

const createApp = require('ringcentral-chatbot/dist/apps').default
const { createAsyncProxy } = require('ringcentral-chatbot/dist/lambda')
const serverlessHTTP = require('serverless-http')
const handle = async event => {
  const { type, text, group, bot } = event
  if (type === 'Message4Bot' && text === 'ping') {
    await bot.sendMessage(group.id, { text: 'pong' })
  }
}
const app = createApp(handle)
module.exports.app = serverlessHTTP(app)
module.exports.proxy = createAsyncProxy('app')

Create and Setup Your Database

If you have access to a MySQL or PostgreSQL database you are free to use that. If you do not, you can use AWS's RDS service to create one through the following steps:

1. Login to the AWS Console and navigate to RDS.
2. Create a PostgreSQL database.
3. Configure the security group so that it is publicly accessible with username and password.

Take a note of the database uri, database name, username and password, we will use them soon.

Create .env.yml

Create a file called .env.yml with the following properties (use this template to help):

Create serverless.yml

Create serverless.yml with following content:

service:
  name: demo-ping-chatbot
provider:
  stage: ${opt:stage, 'prod'}
  name: aws
  runtime: nodejs8.10
  region: us-east-1
  memorySize: 256
  environment: ${file(./.env.yml)}
  iamRoleStatements:
    - Effect: Allow
      Action:
        - lambda:InvokeFunction
      Resource: "*"
package:
  exclude:
    - ./**
    - '!lambda.js'
    - '!node_modules/**'
  excludeDevDependencies: true
functions:
  app:
    handler: lambda.app
    timeout: 300
  proxy:
    handler: lambda.proxy
    events:
      - http: 'ANY {proxy+}'

Get a Lambda URL

To obtain the public URL of your new chat bot, you must deploy to AWS. This URL is essential as it will be used to tell RingCentral where to post webhooks and notifications when users install and interact with your bot.

npx sls deploy

Update .env.yml

Once the project is successfully deployed, a Lambda URL will be provisioned to you. Now, edit the .env.yml file and set RINGCENTRAL_CHATBOT_SERVER to this URL. It should be in the form of:

https://xxxxxx.execute-api.yyyy.amazonaws.com/prod

Redeploy to AWS

We must redeploy the bot after we edit env.yml:

npx sls deploy

Set the "OAuth Redirect URI"

Login to https://developer.ringcentral.com, navigate to your bot app, and open the "Settings" tab. Then set "OAuth Redirect URI" to your bot's OAuth endpoint. The URL is your Lambda URL plus "/prod/bot/oauth". For example:

https://xxxxxx.execute-api.yyyyy.amazonaws.com/prod/bot/oauth

Initialize the Database

With your bot setup and deployed, we need to initialize the database by creating the database tables needed to manage the bot's state, and persist the many auth tokens, and subscriptions needed to keep your bot up and running.

curl -X PUT -u admin:password https://<chatbot-server>/prod/admin/setup-database

The access credentials (-u admin:password) are defined in the env.yml file we created above.

Install and Test the Bot

Once all of the above is complete, open your Bot in the RingCentral Developer Console. Click "Bot" in the left-hand menu. Set your bot name, then click the button "Add to Glip." Then login to the Glip Sandbox to test.

Troubleshooting

Our community has shared some of these troubleshooting experiences, feel free to add your own.

• AWS Lambda connects AWS RDS issue
  • If you create an RDS manually and let it create a new security group for you.
    • By default, the security group only allows inbound traffic from your current laptop's public IP address
    • AWS Lambda by default cannot access the newly created AWS RDS
    • We need to update security group to allow inbound traffic from 0.0.0.0/0
• AWS Lambda and await issue
  • AWS Lambda is stateless and it won't keep a background task running
  • So if your code is async, DO remember to use await. Otherwise that code will not be executed before Lambda invocation terminates
  • I forgot to await, a weird phenomenon was: whenever I issued a command, I always got reply of previous command
• AWS Lambda global code dead-lock issue
  • Do NOT invoke lambda functions in global code outside of handlers
  • I tried once and it seemed to case dead-lock. Lots of requests which causes 429 error and database connection exhausted
    • In global code I did axio.put('https://<bot-server>/admin/maintain') and it caused dead-lock

• Last updated:
• Contributors