Simple Telegram Bot

Designed for personal use, not interactive. Example: notify yourself when there are changes on a website.

Setup Telegram Bot

1. register a Telegram bot, [follow the instructions] (https://core.telegram.org/bots), keep your bot token safe
2. start a chat with your bot
3. find your personal chat_id, open https://api.telegram.org/bot<bot_token>/getUpdates in a browser or using curl:

{
	"ok":true,
	"result":[
	{
		"update_id":59xxxxx05,
		"message":
		{
			"message_id":xxxx,
			"from":
			{
				"id":1xxxxxx4,
				"is_bot":false,
				"first_name":"John",
				"last_name":"Doe",
				"username":"jdoe",
				"language_code":"en-US"
			},
			"chat":
			{
---->			"id":1xxxxxx4,
				"first_name":"John",
				"last_name":"Doe",
				"username":"jdoe",
				"type":"private"
			},
			"date":1xxxxxxxx6,
			"text":"foo"
		}
	}]
}

Installation using pipenv

create a .env file with the follwing contents:

TELEGRAM_BOT_NAME=<your_bot_name>
TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN=<your_bots_secret_token>
TELEGRAM_BOT_HANDLE=@<handle>Bot
TELEGRAM_BOT_DEFAULT_CHAT_ID=<chat_id>

$ cd SimpleTelegramBot
$ pipenv install -e .
$ pipenv install

Note: On a RaspberryPi the creation of the virtual environment may take long enough to run into a timeout. To avoid this export PIPENV_TIMEOUT=2400 before executing any pipenv commands.

Usage Examples

send yourself a message

$ pipenv shell
$ python3 utils/send_message.py "foo bar"
# or
$ pipenv run python3 utils/send_message.py "foo bar"

send yourself a file

$ pipenv run python3 utils/send_file.py test.txt

get notified about changes on websites

create a urls.json file containing websites you want to be notified about:

{
  "URLs": [
    {
      "name": "Example",
      "URL": "https://www.example.com",
      "diffIgnore": ["<meta name=\"date\""]
    },
    {
      "name": "Google",
      "URL": "https://www.google.com",
      "diffIgnore": []
    }
  ]
}

Note the diffIgnore field. This can be used to ignore any changes that contain certain substrings. As in the example above, this can be useful for <meta> tags that may change with each request.

Periodically execute:

$ pipenv run python3 utils/url_notifier.py

Cronjobs example

$ crontab -e
# EDITOR
# ...
# execute every 15 minutes
*/15 * * * * bash -lc "cd /path/to/SimpleTelegramBot && /path/to/pipenv run python3 utils/url_notifier.py >> /path/to/SimpleTelegramBot/logs/log.txt 2>&1"