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Vizzini

Vizzini is a Skype bot with a variety of fun commands.

It's built using Claudia Bot Builder which allows you to quickly deploy a bot to many different services (e.g. Skype, Slack, Facebook Messenger) on AWS API Gateway and Lambda. This app only has Skype enabled.

Commands:

  • /help shows the list of available commands.
  • /recipe displays a random recipe pulled from spoonacular.com.
  • /science <text> converts "some text" to "S.O.M.E. T.E.X.T.". Don't ask...

Due to Skype having its own slash commands, you need to put a space before the slash if talking to the bot directly.

History

I wrote my first Skype bot in July 2017 and named it gvobot. It was written in Python using microsoftbotframework and hosted on Heroku. It had commands like !number (random number), !song (random song from a list of youtube links in a DB), !recipe (random recipe from food2fork.com).

In August 2019, I got an email saying they were deprecating Skype bots and I needed to move the bot registration to Azure. In that process, I decided to rewrite it in Node.js using botbuilder and move hosting and deployment over to Azure as well (this was a pain!). I only implemented a few commands, but I did give it a fun name: vizzini (anyone want a peanut?).

In May 2020, I was studying for the AWS Developer Associate exam and wanted to work on a serverless project, so I decided to rewrite vizzini using Claudia.js, which is a framework for deploying Node.js projects to AWS API Gateway and Lambda. It was very easy to setup and a great way get my hands dirty with those AWS services. food2fork.com had shutdown, so when I rewriting the recipe functionality, I switched to spoonacular.com.

Installation

Pre-requisites

Steps

  1. Install Node.js dependencies.

    npm install

  2. Create the bot API in your AWS account (defaults to us-east-1). You will be prompted for your Microsoft app ID and secret, which can be found in the Web App Bot settings in Azure. This uses the claudia cli to create the API Gateway and Lambda in your default AWS account. You can set the AWS_PROFILE environment variable to specify a different AWS account.

    npm run create

  3. Grab the Skype URL at the bottom of the create command's output, and use it to set the messaging endpoint in your Web App Bot settings in Azure.

You should now be able to message the bot on Skype and get a response.

Deployment

This uses the claudia cli to deploy a new version of the Lambda function and, if needed, update the API Gateway.

npm run update

If you don't have the claudia.json previously created by npm run create, then create it with the following template:

{
  "lambda": {
    "role": "PACKAGE_NAME-executor",
    "name": "PACKAGE_NAME",
    "region": "us-east-1"
  },
  "api": {
    "id": "API_GATEWAY_ID",
    "module": "bot",
    "url": "https://API_GATEWAY_ID.execute-api.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/latest",
    "deploy": {
      "skype": "https://API_GATEWAY_ID.execute-api.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/latest/skype"
    }
  }
}

Variables:

  • PACKAGE_NAME is the name of this package in package.json
  • API_GATEWAY_ID is the ID of the existing API Gateway

Infrastructure

This app uses Claudia to easily deploy Node.js to AWS Lambda and API Gateway.

It uses a "REST API" type API Gateway with a single lambda attached as LAMBDA_PROXY for two endpoints: GET / (health check) and POST /skype (skype messaging). I believe the resources are named after either the folder name or the name in package.json.

Contributing

Pull requests are welcome. For major changes, please open an issue first to discuss what you would like to change.

Please make sure to update tests as appropriate.

License

MIT