abstract-bot-api

This library solves two problems:

  1. You want to switch between chat providers and not change your code.
  2. You have deep stacked code that needs to access the chat api (e.g. to send a loading message from some internal method), and you don’t want to carry around credentials as globals (because maybe you have two bots running in the same server).

The first problem is solved by making a simple common api for all the services, while the second is solved using https://github.com/uriva/context-inject.

This library provides a unified API over:

  1. telegram
  2. whatsapp
  3. green-api (unofficial whatsapp api)
  4. websocket (for web page chat) 1

Installation

node.js:

npm i abstract-bot-api

deno:

import abc from "https://deno.land/x/abstract_bot_api/src/index.ts";

API

The abstract api methods:

reply: (text: string) => Promise<string> - a simple reply that gets text and returns the sent message id.

messageId: () => string - the incoming message id

referenceId: () => string - if the message quoted another message

medium: () => string - which service was used (‘whatsapp’, ‘green-api’ etc’)

userId: () => string - the user id who sent the current message

withSpinner: (text: string, f: Function) => Function - wraps an async function with logic that provides a waiting animation for users

progressBar: (text: string) => Promise<(percentage: number) => Promise<void>> - get a way to send progress updates that appear in a loading bar animation

The nice thing is you can call these methods from anywhere in your code, so you don’t need to pass through things to deeply nested functions. The library understands by the call stack the context the messages should go to (see example below).

example

Here’s an example usage:

import {
    AbstractIncomingMessage,
    bouncerServer,
    makeTelegramHandler,
    setTelegramWebhook,
    withSpinner,
} from "../src/index.ts";

import { gamla } from "../deps.ts";
import { reply } from "../src/api.ts";
import {
    whatsappBusinessHandler,
    whatsappWebhookVerificationHandler,
} from "../src/whatsapp.ts";

const { coerce, sleep } = gamla;
const telegramToken = coerce(Deno.env.get("TELEGRAM_TOKEN"));
const botServerSuffix = "/bot-url-suffix";

const whatsappPath = "/whatsapp-url-suffix";

const handleMessage = async (task: AbstractIncomingMessage) => {
    console.log("got task", task);
    await withSpinner("waiting needlessly", sleep)(5000);
    return reply("hi there i got " + JSON.stringify(task));
};

const url = coerce(Deno.env.get("URL"));

await bouncerServer(
    url,
    coerce(Deno.env.get("PORT")),
    [
        makeTelegramHandler(telegramToken, botServerSuffix, handleMessage),
        whatsappBusinessHandler(
            coerce(Deno.env.get("WHATSAPP_ACCESS_TOKEN")),
            whatsappPath,
            handleMessage,
        ),
        whatsappWebhookVerificationHandler(
            coerce(Deno.env.get("WHATSAPP_VERIFICATION_TOKEN")),
            whatsappPath,
        ),
    ],
);
await setTelegramWebhook(telegramToken, url + botServerSuffix).then(
    console.log,
);