First you need to pull in the Web Driver.
composer require botman/driver-web
Then load the driver before creating the BotMan instance (only when you don't use BotMan Studio):
DriverManager::loadDriver(\BotMan\Drivers\Web\WebDriver::class);
// Create BotMan instance
BotManFactory::create($config);
Or if you use BotMan Studio:
php artisan botman:install-driver web
This driver can be used as a starting point to add BotMan to your website or API. The driver itself receives the incoming requests and responds with a JSON representing the message result. So you can for example build your own chat-interface that talks to BotMan through the WebDriver.
This is a basic and valid incoming JSON request for the WebDriver. In BotMan Studio it works as GET or POST request, but it depends on your BotMan setup.
{
"driver": "web",
"userId": "1234",
"message": "hi"
}
The driver value is used to validate the request for this specific driver. Read more about that below. The userId is the sender of the request and used for connecting requests to conversations. And finally the message is the content of the user's message obviously.
{callout-info} You can send more values along the request and use them in you application as well.
This is an example response from BotMan. It contains a message array that holds all messages that BotMan replies.
{
"status":200,
"messages":[
{
"type":"text",
"text":"I have no idea what you are talking about!",
"attachment":{
"type":"image",
"url":"https:\/\/botman.io\/img\/logo.png",
"title":null
}
}
]
}
The driver configuration allows you to define which request parameters need to be present in order for BotMan to detect the incoming request as a request for the "web" driver. By default, all HTTP requests to your BotMan controller need to contain a driver attribute with the value web.
Pass the driver configuration to the BotManFactory upon initialization. If you use BotMan Studio, you can find the configuration file located under config/botman/web.php.
[
'web' => [
'matchingData' => [
'driver' => 'web',
],
]
]
The most common use case for the BotMan web driver is probably to use it in combination with a frontend widget and provide a chat interface on your existing website. To make this as easy as possible, BotMan ships with a ready-to-use web widget, that you can add to your website. You can find the documentation here.
Since this is a "naked" web-driver implementation, it is up to you to implement the features that you need.