Your Own Website

These docs are for version 1.x of Rasa Open Source.

User Guide

NLU

Core

Conversation Design

API Reference

Migrate from (beta)

Reference

Your Own Website

If you just want an easy way for users to test your bot, the best option is usually the chat interface that ships with Rasa X, where you can invite users to test your bot.

If you already have an existing website and want to add a Rasa assistant to it, you can use Chatroom, a widget which you can incorporate into your existing webpage by adding a HTML snippet. Alternatively, you can also build your own chat widget.

Websocket Channel

The SocketIO channel uses websockets and is real-time. You need to supply a credentials.yml with the following content:

socketio:
  user_message_evt: user_uttered
  bot_message_evt: bot_uttered
  session_persistence: true/false

The first two configuration values define the event names used by Rasa Core when sending or receiving messages over socket.io.

By default, the socketio channel uses the socket id as sender_id, which causes the session to restart at every page reload. session_persistence can be set to true to avoid that. In that case, the frontend is responsible for generating a session id and sending it to the Rasa Core server by emitting the event session_request with {session_id: [session_id]} immediately after the connect event.

The example Webchat implements this session creation mechanism (version >= 0.5.0).

REST Channels

The RestInput and CallbackInput channels can be used for custom integrations. They provide a URL where you can post messages and either receive response messages directly, or asynchronously via a webhook.

RestInput

The rest channel will provide you with a REST endpoint to post messages to and in response to that request will send back the bots messages. Here is an example on how to connect the rest input channel using the run script:

rasa run

you need to ensure your credentials.yml has the following content:

rest:
  # you don't need to provide anything here - this channel doesn't
  # require any credentials

After connecting the rest input channel, you can post messages to POST /webhooks/rest/webhook with the following format:

{
  "sender": "Rasa",
  "message": "Hi there!"
}

The response to this request will include the bot responses, e.g.

[
  {"text": "Hey Rasa!"}, {"image": "http://example.com/image.jpg"}
]

CallbackInput

The callback channel behaves very much like the rest input, but instead of directly returning the bot messages to the HTTP request that sends the message, it will call a URL you can specify to send bot messages.

Here is an example on how to connect the callback input channel using the run script:

rasa run

you need to supply a credentials.yml with the following content:

callback:
  # URL to which Core will send the bot responses
  url: "http://localhost:5034/bot"

After connecting the callback input channel, you can post messages to POST /webhooks/callback/webhook with the following format:

{
  "sender": "Rasa",
  "message": "Hi there!"
}

The response will simply be success. Once Core wants to send a message to the user, it will call the URL you specified with a POST and the following JSON body:

[
  {"text": "Hey Rasa!"}, {"image": "http://example.com/image.jpg"}
]

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