BotPress — Setup on Ubuntu with HTTPS

This has been a pretty tiring process so I thought of documenting whatever I know about setting up BotPress on Ubuntu. Hope this helps anyone trying to set it up, I know this could have saved me 4 sleepless nights.

Minimum requirements: Server should have 4GB RAM

Installing WordPress on Ubuntu

Following the guide from Alibaba Cloud all the way from wget to ufw to nginx and certbot

Getting Started with Botpress on Alibaba Cloud

This will get you started, but you will be greeted with loads of WSS or WS errors in console when creating chatbots.

The nginx configuration from the Alibaba Cloud tutorial doesn’t work that well in the actual usage of BotPress.

HTTPS and SSL setup for BotPress

This is when you have to grab the nginx config from aabingunz’s blog. There is a certain dedication to BotPress in this blog, but I’m not sure if he is part of the BotPress team though.

Note:

1. While copying the example nginx config, note that your nginx path is not the same as aabingunz’s nginx path, so change it accordingly.
2. Remember the SSL create you created earlier with certbot? Use this cert in the nginx config, instead of generating a new one with OpenSSL (which is shown in aabingunz’s guide). I’ve tried using the OpenSSL cert, but for one reason or another, things were just not working right. So I eventually tried the certbot SSL cert, and the entire setup worked.

With that said, here’s the link to aabingunz’s guide for https

https://aabingunz.com/how-to-enable-https-in-botpress/

In Summary

There you have it, the simplest working guide to getting BotPress working on Ubuntu.

While BotPress definitely looks promising… we eventually moved on to another platform that was proprietary, but more stable.

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