Using botframework emulator or bots hosted remotely without internet connectivity

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votes

I am trying to test my bot. It is hosted remotely but on a server that has no internet connectivity but is reachable within the LAN. I want to use the Botframework emulator to test. The emulator relies on ngrok. But I have two restrictions : 1) I cannot install ngrok on my corporate machine. 2) Even if I somehow managed to cut through the red tape and install ngrok , without internet connectivity on the server that hosts my bot, the responses would still not reach my emulator.

How can I use a service url that hits my emulator directly without using ngrok ?

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botframework

1 Answers

0
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First, ngrok is only necessary for connecting to bots hosted remotely. If you are looking to run everything locally on the closed server, then ngrok is not required.

With regards to options, you have a couple that may work for you.

One, you can look at utilizing offline-directline. This option allows you to generate a token locally without having to connect to the public direct line offering on Azure. Be aware that this npm package is configured for the v3 "BotChat" web chat tool. So, utilizing this will require your modifying the configuration to work with the newer v4 Web Chat (not to be confused with the v3/v4 SDKs).

Two, consider using this Browser Bot sample, located here, from the Botbuilder-Samples GitHub repo. In this instance, the bot and web chat adapters are fully contained within the browser and, as such, do not require a connection to direct line to run. The bot adapter uses the v4 Node SDK while the web chat adapter uses the v4 React-based implementation.

Hope of help!