External Relations Chatbot

Developed to deal with redundant queries about University of Glasgow short courses.

The chatbot can be accessed live and running here.

Getting Started

These instructions will get you a copy of the project up and running on your local machine for development and testing purposes. See deployment for notes on how to deploy the project on a live system.

Prerequisites

Please ensure all dependancies for both client and server are fully installed in order to run the project.

Installing client dependancies

$ npm install

Installing server dependancies

Make sure to run

$ pip install -r requirements.txt

or if you are not using a virtual environment,

$ pip3 install -r requirements.txt

when in the folder with that file. It is recommended to run the server in a virtual environment.

Installing

The following commands for running the client and server must be ran simoultaneously in different terminals in order to run the full project.

Running the client

Simply run

$ npm run dev

Running the server

The server needs some environmental variables to be set in order to run properly. You can look in .env.example to see the environmental variables that are currently required. Their values can currently be found in the Wiki. Once you have them, within the same folder as the example, create a new file called .env and paste them in there. Be careful not to commit it.

To run the server itself, in the folder where manage.py exists, run

$ python manage.py runserver 5000

or if you are not using a virtual environment,

$ python3 manage.py runserver 5000

Testing

Snapshot and Dialogflow intents tests

These tests have been developed using the Cypress testing framework.

First navigate to the client directory

To install cypress run the following command

$ npm install cypress

To run the tests:

$ npm run cypress:open

Server tests

Within the folder that contains manage.py, run

$ python manage.py test

or if you are not using a virtual environment,

$ python3 manage.py test

Deployment

Building

Within the client directory

$ npm run build

Will create a dist directory containing your compiled code.

Depending on your needs, you might want to do more optimization to the production build.

Webpack Bundle Analyzer

Run in development

$ npm run dev:bundleanalyzer

Run on the production optimized build

$ npm run build:bundleanalyzer

Built With

• DialogFlow - Chatbot
• Firebase - Communication between client and DialogFlow
• ReactJS - The actual frontend that the user sees
• React-Simple-Chatbot - The client framework
• Cypress - For testing the frontend
• ResponsiveVoiceJS - For text to speech capabilities
• Django - For the backend server
• SendGrid - To send email to the clients
• AWS - To host the database and server
• MySQL - The database
• TypeForm - The feedback form that appears at the end

Contributors

Please read Contributors.md for our contact details.

Authors

• Anguel Hristozov
• Justyna Toporkiewicz
• Hannah Mehravari
• Odysseas Polycarpou
• Martin Manov

License

MIT

See LICENSE for entire license information.

Acknowledgments

• Dr. Jeff Dalton - for his incredible help and guidance throughout the entire project lifecycle
• React Simple Chatbot - Base React component used for frontend