Botframework - Bot working properly with Emulator but nothing with any published channel

Question

I've been tinkering around with the nodejs bot framework. I was sucessfuly able to create a bot that sends proactive messages but it just so happens that it is only working with the emulator.

It works on my local server and also on my remote server at https://chatobot.ngrok.io/api/messages

So far so good.

However, after going through the registration process at https://dev.botframework.com and "sucessfuly" publish it at the Skype Channel and Telegram channel, nothing happens. The bot won't reply and nothing is hitting my server's endpoint.

I've used the Test feature you find on the botframework website. It send's my message, but it seems to never reach my server. Also, as far as I can tell, it doesn't give me any error.

However, when I connect to my remote server using the Emulator everything works...!

What I have done:

• Made sure my MS_APP_ID and MS_APP_PWD are properly set as environment variables.
• Started by serving my api with HTTPS using nginx (with a self-signed certificate) and later with ngrok (just to make sure it wasn't a problem with my own certificate).
• Tried to add more Channels (Slack and what not) to make sure it wasn't a problem specific to Skype or the Web Chat.
• Looked for similar problems on SO. There are quite a few, but usually those people are able to solve their problem by updating they APP_ID and APP_PWD (which I've also tried) or even getting some sort of feedback in the form of an error...unfortunately it's not my case :|

PS: Don't mind my MS Paint skills.

PS2: Here's my code https://github.com/assimoes/chatobot

Answer 1

So, I could confirm the origin of the problem is obviously at my remote server. What happens is that if I run my server as a linux service, for some reason the endpoint is never hit...however, if I run node index.js at the console everything works?

I will try to research more on to why this happens, but any suggestion would be highly appreciated!

UPDATE

So I finally figured this out. So what was happening was that I had the following systemd configuration for my nodejs api:

#/etc/systemd/system/bot.service
[Unit]
Description=Node.js Chatobot server
    
[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/node /www/chatobot/index.js
Restart=always
RestartSec=10
StandardOutput=syslog
StandardError=syslog
SyslogIdentifier=nodejs-chatobot
User=chb
Environment=NODE_ENV=development PORT=8009

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

What this meant was that when I started the service, the environment variables with my APP ID and my APP PWD were not accessible to the running process. To solve this issue, I just had to change the systemd script to this:

#/etc/systemd/system/bot.service
[Unit]
Description=Node.js Chatobot server
    
[Service]

Environment=MS_APP_ID=<MY APP ID>
Environment=MS_APP_PWD=<MY APP PWD>

ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/node /www/chatobot/index.js
Restart=always
RestartSec=10
StandardOutput=syslog
StandardError=syslog
SyslogIdentifier=nodejs-chatobot
User=chb
Environment=NODE_ENV=development PORT=8009

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

This solved everything.