BOTFRAMEWORK-EMULATOR.md

BotFramework Emulator

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• 00.OVERVIEW
• Bot Framework Emulator
• Manual resource setup
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• Teams Toolkit CLI

Bot Framework Emulator allows testing bots independently from Channels when developing your bot. If you do not wish to use Teams Toolkit, please follow the steps below to test your bot in Emulator.

Visit the repo (link above) or check out the releases page to download the latest version of the Emulator.

Testing in BotFramework Emulator

After installing Emulator, you can run it and set it to listen to your local or remote endpoint.

NOTE! Channel-specific features (For example, Teams Message Extensions) are not supported in Emulator and therefore not fully-testable via Emulator.

Sample launch steps

1. Launch Bot Framework Emulator
2. If you haven't already, run yarn && yarn build in the js directory of this repo
3. Run the sample app you are in the directory for (see below)

cd teams-ai/js
yarn && yarn build # only need to do this once after cloning or pulling
cd teams-ai/js/samples/<sample-app-name>
yarn start

Using the Emulator

1. Add your app's messaging endpoint to the "Open a Bot" dialog.
2. The local bot endpoint is your localhost endpoint with the path /api/messages appended. The default port for the bot is 3978. The default is: http://localhost:3978/api/messages.

Note: For a locally running bot, the app id and password are not required.

Azure Bot Service with Emulator

1. In order to test remote apps, you will need to use a tunneling service like ngrok
2. For a remote endpoint, Microsoft App Id and password are required.
3. Your ngrok endpoint will be something like https://ngrok-url-here/api/messages.
4. In a new terminal window, run ngrok http 3978 to start the tunneling service.

For detailed instructions on using the Bot Framework Emulator, see the Microsoft Learn documentation

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