Botkit with Watson and Facebook - Why open tunnel? Couldn't be launched in Bluemix?

Question

I was trying to implement the Watson Conversation Service, using Botkit for Facebook. All the papers, including this https://github.com/watson-developer-cloud/botkit-middleware/tree/master/examples/multi-bot indicates to stablish a tunnel on my local computer to publish the app. I don't undertand why is it necessary. Couldn't be possible to use Bluemix, as with the Watson App but for the Botkit App? Did anybody implement it all in the cloud?

Thank you very much!

Answer 1

Facebook requires your webhook to be available at a publicly accessible port over https.

For local development, you need a way to publicly expose a port on your local machine.

If you were running the code on the cloud, it would already be at a publicly accessible address. So there is no need for localtunnel or ngrok in production.