Deployment

Deploying a Bottender server is as easy as deploying a regular Node server.

In this section, following fast and simple ways of deployment are introduced:

• Now
• Heroku

Note that these services have limited free dynos. If your bots need to be up 24/7, you should consider paid plans or other services.

Now

You can set vars in bottender.config.js as environment vars and secrets.

Secrets

$ now secret add my_verify_token 1qaz2wsx

You can list, rename and remove your secrets by the following commands:

$ now secret ls
$ now secret rename my_verify_token verify_token
$ now secret rm my_verify_token

Environment Variables

Use @var to set the environment variable with your now secrets.

$ now -e VERIFY_TOKEN=1qaz2wsx
$ now -e VERIFY_TOKEN=@verify_token

Deploy

$ now

List Project

$ now ls

Alias

Make alias to set your customized domain.

$ now alias zeit-suslhdzwiy.now.sh workshop // workshop.now.sh
$ now alias zeit-suslhdzwiy.now.sh bottender.com // upgrade plan

Heroku

You can deploy your bot on Heroku simply using Heroku CLI after creating a new app.

$ heroku login

Creating a New Git Repository

$ cd my-project/
$ git init
$ heroku git:remote -a your-app-name // for existing repositories, simply add heroku remote

Setting Server Port

Heroku use $PORT environment variable to tell apps which port should their server listen. You should make sure your bot server is listening on process.env.PORT instead of any other hard-coded ports.

For example,

const port = process.env.PORT || 5000;
server.listen(port, () => {
  console.log(`server is running on ${port} port...`);
});

Setting Node Version

Make sure your Node version on Heroku is higher than 7.6.0. These lines can be added to package.json to specify the Node version.

"engines": {
  "node": ">= 7.6.0"
}

Deploy

$ git add .
$ git commit -am "make it better"
$ git push heroku master