I’m looking in to BotMan to revamp my existing Messenger-based chatbot and had a lot of trouble getting BotMan to listen. When using BotMan Studio, it’s easy, but I didn’t want to create a whole new Laravel app just to use the software, so I followed BotMan’s integration documentation.

I installed the package, followed the instructions, but nothing was happening. Then after much fiddling, I came across a few things that got it working:

• The DialogFlow token should be your Client Access Token, which you can find by going into the settings for your DialogFlow agent:

• You need to add the Laravel Cache to the BotMan Factory:

<?php

namespace App\Http\Controllers;

use Illuminate\Http\Request;

use BotMan\BotMan\BotMan;
use BotMan\BotMan\BotManFactory;
use BotMan\BotMan\Middleware\DialogFlow;
use BotMan\BotMan\Cache\LaravelCache; // Add this

class AuroraBotController extends Controller
{

  function handleIntent(Request $request) {
    $botman = BotManFactory::create(config('aurorabot.botman', []), new LaravelCache(), app()->make('request')); // And change this line to this
    $dialogflow = DialogFlow::create(config('aurorabot.apikey', null))->listenForAction();
    $botman->middleware->received($dialogflow);

    $botman->hears('get_current_kp', function (BotMan $bot) {
      // Handle the intent here
    })->middleware($dialogflow);

    $botman->listen();

  }
}