Christoph Rumpel: Build a Facebook Messenger chatbot in Laravel with BotMan Studio 2.0

Christoph Rumpel has written up a tutorial on his site showing you how to use Larave and the Botman package to create a simple chatbot for use on Facebook.

With BotMan it is really easy to setup a Facebook chatbot. This week the new 2.0 version was released. We will checkout how to setup a Facebook Messenger chatbot in this new version with BotMan Studio.

He starts with a list of requirements to be sure you have installed before proceeding. He then helps you get the Botman software installed and the command to bootstrap a Facebook bot instance. He includes instructions on how to test the bot and how to configure it to work with a Facebook application (requiring relevant token/secret information). From there he shows you how to set up the Facebook application and connect the bot to it via a webhook. The ngrok tool makes this easier as it exposes your local Laravel application on an external URL for testing. Finally, he shows how to test the integration by sending a few sample messages to the bot and getting responses.