Facebook messenger chat bot in PHP

Facebook messenger chat bot: Facebook has introduced it’s bot platform for messenger, that provides a new platform for individuals or business so that they can interact with their customers faster and in a very interactive way.

What is chat bot: A computer program designed to simulate a conversation with human users  especially over the internet. It has functionality ranges from normal interaction to having highly artificial intelligence.

Requirement to start creating bot: In a basic requirement, you must have three things

• Website or webpage hosted with an SSL certificate, else Facebook will not accept your url for the request and response to the messenger.
• Facebook app
• Facebook page

Let’s create a chat bot using the Facebook messenger platform.

First of all, create a Facebook page, visit https://www.facebook.com/pages/create and you’ll see options as below screenshot.

You can select any category as per your business or individual choice. After selecting a category, you’ll asked few more options, after putting all the required information on the next screen, your Facebook page will be created as below screenshot.

Your page will look like as above screenshot after few more setting, in the page setting options. Now we have a Facebook page, now we need an app to connect this page to the messenger platform and your desired website or web page.

To create an app, go to https://developers.facebook.com/apps and hit the button labeled add a new app and you’ll get a pop window which will ask for some details as below screenshot.

After hitting the button create App ID, your app will be created and you’ll be redirected to the app’s dashboard and you’ll see something like below screenshot.

Now, click on the add product button to add messenger to your app. After clicking add product button, you’ll see list of products, search for messenger and click on the get started button. On the next page, you’ll have to do two things, first is, generate token for your earlier created Facebook page and the second is,  setup of webhook, which is your website’s or webpage’s url.

After selecting the desired page, you’ll get access token to that page and this token will be used as security token between your web application and facebook application. Now click on the setup webhooks button and fill the form, put url and any randon string that suits to your business as I’ve given webkul_fb_shopbot, which will be further used to verify your given url and check all the desired options whatever you want and click on verify and save button, it will hit to your url for verification.

Put the code as below screenshot and it will verify to your webhook url and always hit this url when any customer will chat with the page.

For any further support, please mail us at support@webkul.com

Thanks