Experimenting with the Python SDK for the Bot Framework.

• main.py => Echo Bot from the Wiki
• examples.py => Code snippets working with the SDK

There's barely anything in this repository, so I'm not sure why you would want to clone and run it just yet, but okay...

Make sure you have Python installed (obviously). I recommend the Anaconda distribution, as it comes a lot of the mathematics, data science, and machine learning libraries used for artificial intelligence.

Clone this repository:

git clone https://github.com/szul/py-bot.git

Python recommends using virtual environments to keep your dependencies coupled to your project rather than polluting the global namespace.

cd py-bot
python -m venv .\

Now you have a virtual environment set up in the py-bot directory. Don't do anything with it just yet.

The Python SDK is experimental, so you're going to have to build it from the source.

Clone the botbuilder-python repository:

cd ..\
git clone https://github.com/Microsoft/botbuilder-python

Note that I moved outside of the py-bot directory. I put the py-bot working directory and the botbuilder-python directory at the same level in the filesystem to make it easier to navigate and document.

There are couple of things that you will want to do globally, because you are going to need them in your Python workflow anyway. You should already have pip installed, since it hopefully came with your distribution of Python. Now you need to install wheel and make sure a few other libraries are up-to-date.

pip install wheel
python -m pip install --upgrade pip setuptools wheel

If these utilities are not up-to-date, you may get an error when attempting to install the botbuilder output. The most common error is one that doesn't recognize bdist_wheel

Now that your Python environment is up-to-date, you will need to build the botbuilder SDK.

cd botbuilder-python\libraries\botbuilder-schema
python setup.py bdist_wheel

cd ..\botframework-connector
python setup.py bdist_wheel

cd ..\botbuilder-core
python setup.py bdist_wheel

Once built, you can install the botbuilder library, but you will want to do that in the virtual environment.

First, go back to the root of the py-bot project, and activate your virtual environment:

.\Scripts\activate

Then install the botbuilder library:

pip install ..\botbuilder-python\botbuilder-core\dist\botbuilder_core-4.0.0a0-py3-none-any.whl

You can test your environment by running pip list and checking the output. It should look something like this:

Package                Version
---------------------- ---------
asn1crypto             0.24.0
botbuilder-core        4.0.0a0
botbuilder-schema      4.0.0a0
botframework-connector 4.0.0a0
certifi                2018.1.18
cffi                   1.11.5
chardet                3.0.4
cryptography           2.1.4
idna                   2.6
isodate                0.6.0
msrest                 0.4.26
oauthlib               2.0.6
pip                    9.0.1
pycparser              2.18
PyJWT                  1.6.0
requests               2.18.4
requests-oauthlib      0.8.0
setuptools             28.8.0
six                    1.11.0
urllib3                1.22

Now you are ready to run the endpoint.

python .\main.py

The output will say that the service is listening on localhost at port 9000. Now boot the Bot Emulator and connection to it. The echo bot in main.py is what is on the botbuilder-python SDK wiki, and it will echo back the statements you give it.

My preference is to use Visual Studio Code for Python development This requires two small changes to get up-and-running with the virtual environment correctly.

In your settings.json file, add the following configuration:

{
    "python.pythonPath": "C:\\PATH_TO_PYBOT\\Scripts\\python.exe",
    "python.autoComplete.extraPaths": [
        "C:\\PATH_TO_PYBOT\\Lib\\site-packages"
    ]
}

In this snippet, PATH_TO_PYBOT represents the path to the project root.