Key Features • Example • Getting started • Additional Information
CSML (Conversational Standard Meta Language) is both a domain-specific programming language and chatbot engine, designed to make it easy to develop complex chatbots.
With a very expressive and text-only syntax, CSML flows are easy to understand, making it easy to deploy and maintain conversational agents. CSML handles short and long-term memory slots, metadata injection, and connecting to any third party API or injecting arbitrary code in any programming language thanks to its powerful runtime APIs.
```cpp start: say "Hi, nice to meet you, I'm a demo bot 👋" if (name) { say "I already know you 😉" goto known } else goto name
name: say Question( "I'd like to know you better, what's your name?", buttons=[ Button("I'm anonymous 😎", accepts=["No", "Nope"]) as anonBtn ], ) hold if (event.match(anonBtn)) { remember name = "anon" } else { remember name = event } goto known
known: if (name == "anon") say "...but I know you don't want to say too much about yourself!" else say "You are {{name}}!" goto end ```
The full documentation is available on https://docs.csml.dev/language.
The simplest way to get started with CSML is to use CSML Studio, a free online development environment with everything already setup to start creating bots right away, directly in your browser.
To get started with CSML Studio: https://studio.csml.dev
CSML Studio gives you a free playground to experiment with the language as well as options to deploy your chatbots at scale in one-click.
CSML is available as a self-hostable web server that you can easily install with one of the options below.
Note that you will need a database. The default choice is MongoDB, but Amazon DynamoDB, PostgreSQL and SQLite
are also available by choosing the mongodb, dynamodb, postgresql or sqlite engine DB type with a slightly different set of environment variables.
Before you start, make sure that you have the environment set with following options:
``` ENGINEDBTYPE=mongodb # must be one of mongodb|dynamodb|postgresql|sqlite
MONGODBURI=mongodb://username:password@localhost:27017 MONGODBDATABASE=csml
POSTGRESQL_URL=postgres://user:password@hostname:port/database
SQLITE_URL=csml.db
AWSACCESSKEYID= # or use a local IAM role AWSSECRETACCESSKEY= # or use a local IAM role AWSREGION= AWSDYNAMODBENDPOINT= # optional, defaults to the dynamodb endpoint for the given region. AWSDYNAMODBTABLE= AWSS3ENDPOINT= # optional, defaults to the S3 endpoint for the given region AWSS3_BUCKET=
ENGINESERVERPORT=5000 ENGINESERVERAPI_KEYS=someAuthKey4CsmlServer,someOtherAuthKey
ENGINEENCRYPTIONSECRET=some-secret-string # if not set, data will not be stored encrypted TTLDURATION=30 # auto-remove chatbot user data after X days LOWDATAMODE=true # do not store contents of sent/received messages DISABLESSLVERIFY=false # reach trusted endpoints with known invalid certificates DEBUG=true # print debug output in console CSMLLOGLEVEL=error # print log output in stderr. Possible values are error, warn, info, debug, trace. MODULESURL= # default module repository base url MODULES_AUTH= # default module auth token ```
The easiest way to launch a CSML Engine on your own machine is to use one of our pre-built, optimized binaries (available for both MongoDB and Amazon DynamoDB). These binaries are available as executables on each of CSML's releases since v1.3.0.
Follow the installation guide (for ubuntu, but the process will be similar on other operating systems) along on this blog post: https://blog.csml.dev/how-to-install-a-self-hosted-csml-engine-on-ubuntu-18-04/
To download the latest CSML Server binaries, head over to the latest release and make sure to download the right version for your architecture.
Mac users: upon first execution of this binary, Mac will probably open a warning about the application not being signed (more info from Apple). As this is not intended as a widely-distributed application, we decided to not go through the notarization process for now, but you can safely ignore that warning! However, if you prefer, you can always build this package from source.
We provide a docker image for easy self-hosted usage.
docker pull clevy/csml-engine
To get started with CSML Engine on Docker: https://github.com/CSML-by-Clevy/csml-engine-docker
CSML is built in Rust. You don't need to know any Rust to run it though! Make sure you are running Rust v1.46+ and that you have openssl installed on your machine (or an equivalent for your linux distribution, such as libssl), then run:
``` cd csml_server
cargo build --release --features csml_engine/mongo
cargo build --release --features csml_engine/dynamo ```
After that, execute your build (by default under ./targets/release/csml_server) and visit http://localhost:5000 for some request examples.
This repository provides Node.js bindings of this rust library. To use this library in a Node.js project, you will need to build it from source. There are a few requirements:
To compile CSML Engine into a native node module, run:
shell
git clone https://github.com/CSML-by-Clevy/csml-engine csml
cd csml/bindings/node/native
npm run build -- --release
NB: you can build specifically for MongoDB, DynamoDB, SQLite or PostgreSQL by using one of the specialized scripts (i.e
npm run build:mongodb) in the package.json.
This method will output this native file: csml/bindings/node/native/index.node that you can simply require() (or import) in your project. For more details about how to use this module in your own projects, you can have a look at our implementation for Docker version.
Please note that if you plan to deploy your project on a different architecture, you will need to recompile the project on that architecture. We recommend using git submodules if you need to integrate CSML Engine in your own Node.js projects.
CSML Server's HTTP REST API documentation is available in OpenAPIv3 format: swagger.yaml. To read this file easily, you can open it in Swagger Editor.
