EQ Home Teaching Bot

Automated Home Teaching Reports

This is a simple bot for collecting home teaching reports from your quorum members. It does this by sending and responding to text messages sent with the Twilio API.

The app itself is built with Node.js, Express, and MongoDB. We use Docker and Docker Compose to make it easy to get up and running anywhere.

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Requirements

To get this running, here's what you'll need.

• A Twilio Account
  • You can use the free option, but they'll prepend a bit of placeholder text to your SMS messages.
  • Make a note of your Account SID and Auth Token on the Twilio Console, you'll need them later.
  • Finally, set up a new Messaging Service under the Programmable SMS section. Note the SID of the service once it's created, you'll also need it later.
• An LDS Account with access rights to Home Teaching data
  • E.g., You'll have to be in the Elders Quorum or have another leadership calling.
• Node version >= 6.8
• Yarn or NPM
• ngrok for forwarding Twilio API requests to your local machine while testing
• Docker for running the app
  • Docker for Mac
  • Docker for Windows

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Setup Instructions

First, clone the repository down and jump inside:

$ git clone git@github.com:hamstu/eq-reporting.git
$ cd eq-reporting

Now we'll install the local dependencies:

$ yarn

Or if you're using npm instead:

$ npm install

Now open the example.env file in the project's root folder.

Update the fields to match the ones you noted earlier. You can leave the MONGO_* and NODE_* variables alone, the defaults should be fine.

TWILIO_ACCOUNT_SID=123321441241941819409414
TWILIO_AUTH_TOKEN=47812fe12fe18fd118118d1fd
TWILIO_MESSAGING_SERVICE_ID=abcd123
LDS_ACCOUNT_USERNAME=MyUserName
LDS_ACCOUNT_PASSWORD=password
MONGO_HOST=mongodb://mongo
MONGO_PORT=27017
MONGO_DB=eqreporting
NODE_PORT=8000
ADMIN_USER=admin
ADMIN_PASSWORD=password

Rename the file to .env. (.env is already in the .gitignore and so will not be commited to any repository.)

Scrape Data

Before we can use the app, we need to scrape the necessary member and companionship data from LDS.org. We run this command on your local system – not inside the Docker container like the commands you'll see later – because the scraping process usues an invisible browser to simulate an actual login to your LDS account.

$ npm run scrape

If it completes with no errors you should now have two files – companionship.json and members.json – in the scraped directory.

Note: You'll have to run the scrape command anytime the companionship or member data changes on LDS.org (e.g., you change a home teaching route or assignment.)

Start The App

Let's start everything up with docker-compose.

$ docker-compose up -d

If that worked you should see the app and database containers running with docker-compose ps.

 $ docker-compose ps
       Name                     Command             State            Ports
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
eqreporting_mongo_1   docker-entrypoint.sh mongod   Up      0.0.0.0:27017->27017/tcp
eqreporting_web_1     npm run serve                 Up      0.0.0.0:8000->8000/tcp

Import Scraped Data

With the database runnning inside the Docker container, we can now import the data we scraped earlier.

$ docker-compose exec web npm run import

You'll see something like this:

> eq-reporting@1.0.0 import /app
> node importer.js

John Smith +15552225454
Jane Doe +15552225454
[...]

Now we've got our server running and all the necessary data imported!

Validating numbers

Since not all members will have cell numbers, you can run the check-numbers.js script to validate the numbers as cell phones with Twilio's API. This does cost a small amount per number, so if you'd prefer to do it manually that's also an option.

Automated

$ docker-compose exec web npm run check-numbers

Manually

For now you'll have to manually edit the MongoDB database to set the numberType field for each member to be 'mobile'. Soon I'll have a bulk way to do this, and eventually I'll add a way to ignore this check entirely and send text messages regardless.

Send and Receive a Message

Now let's actually do something with this bot! 🤖 To test it out you'll want to make it publically available (i.e., to the internet). We could just deploy it to a server pretty that supports Docker, but an even quicker way to test is with ngrok.

Install ngrok, and then run this command in a separate console window, so that the express server is still running.

$ ngrok http <PORT>   # replace <PORT> here with the NODE_PORT in your `.env` file

You should see some output that includes:

Forwarding                    http://6f5cd49f.ngrok.io -> localhost:8000

That URL is available to anyone now and will point directly to the app/server running on your computer! (Cool, eh?)

Now copy the ngrok URL http://6f5cd49f.ngrok.io (yours will be different) and paste it into your Twilio Messaging Service's Inbound and Outbound Settings sections as follows:

Request URL:         http://6f5cd49f.ngrok.io/receive
Status Callback URL: http://6f5cd49f.ngrok.io/status

Save the Messaging Service once you've done that.

⭐️ Now send a text message to your Messaging Service's number. If all works well, it should hit the server, look you up your phone number in the ward directory, and reply with a simple response! Try asking for your Home Teaching route by texting the message route to the bot.

Troubleshooting

If you're not getting a text message in response, it might help to check the log output from the server.

$ docker-compose logs -f web

Running that command will give you a live feed of any logs from the server, and will let you know if there are any errors occuring.

Deploying to Production

Coming soon.