Best way to deploy (Free or low cost)

Rasa Open Source
1

Hi there, I desperately need a helping hand here :cold_sweat:

my university project group has created a Rasa Chatbot with custom actions using the Rasa Open Source Framework (Version 3.0).

We got a very good working model and would now like to deploy it at a low cost or for free and use the webhook on a websites chat window for interactions with the chatbot.

I’ve found it quite difficult though to find a good guide on where and how to deploy. I tried heroku and got the base model working (the rasa init which shows you a tiger cub picture) but as I would have to dockerize the actions server separately as heroku exposes only one port at a time its difficult to set it up for the two services to be able to communicate with each other. I tried all weekend to get this to work but I always get errors when building the containers and/or at testing after deployment

My colleague also tried deploying it with Rasa X 1.1 Community Edition (Deprecated now since 8th of June) and also struggled with getting the actions server communicating properly.

I am very frustrated and also reached the point where I would be willing to spend some money for the hosting of the bot. The bot needs to be available for a limited amount of time (project presentation day → demo)

I’d be glad if an experienced person could direct me into a potentially easy and cheap way to deploy the bot including custom actions.

2

@gwelwenant - if this is needed only for during the presentation, why not conisder ngrok to locally tunnel your project to an http endpoint, people can access during your presentation, close the tunnel when done with your pres.

Deployment isn’t trivial to be honest, there are several options but it is time consuming and for the need you have mentioned which i understood, i don’t think you need to make deployments.

3

Hi, I also need to deploy as soon as possible for my project work in School. Can we work together on finding a solution? Here’s my email address: owodunniabraham@gmail.com

4

Is there nothing else that can be done Nothing else?

5

There are several ways to deploy a rasa bot. Yet like I said it is not very trivial and it does cost money.

You can try Google cloud functions as an example I wrote this example to deploy on cloud run. This is free to an extent

6

thank you. I’ll look it up.