Twitter to Telegram Channel Bot v2.0 (ttt)

This project is built with the help of laravel-zero.

The aim of this bot is to "seamlessly" duplicate tweets from any public Twitter account to Telegram channel by leveraging Twitter API v2.0 and Telegram Bot API.

Features

• Possibility to duplicate Twitter account feeds to multiple Telegram channels. E.g. you can have 1 Twitter account to post to multiple Telegram channels or 2+ separate Twitter to Telegram pairs.
• Possibility to extend and add your own handlers (pipes) for Twitter feed manipulation. E.g. if you want to do some manipulation with text from tweets, or maybe you don't need to see any gifs with cats in your Telegram channel you can make that each tweet can be handled as you see fit.
• I finally decided to make this bot as a standalone app (!), although you still need a php ^8.1 to run the script on your machine.
• And as a result of the previous point you can now pass all the necessary configuration as arguments to the bot itself on the command line.

Before using the bot

If you want to use this bot, firstly you need to do some preparations on Twitter and Telegram side. This app can be used for any Twitter account.

1. Create telegram channel.
2. Create telegram bot (through @botfather), remember it's token to access the HTTP API.
3. Add the newly created telegram bot to your telegram channel of choice and give it access to "Post messages". Note: one telegram bot can be added to multiple telegram channels.
4. Create an app on developer.twitter.

Requirements

PHP ^8.1

Running the bot itself

1. From the command line run:

   php ttt manage --help

   This will print help message for the bot.

2. If you wanna do the .env stuff then copy .env.example file to .env file and fill in all the necessary variables OR fill in the environment variables on your server. The values for TWITTER_* can be found on developer.twitter. The value for TELEGRAM_ACCESS_TOKEN should be retrieved when you created your telegram bot.

3. If you wanna use bot's optional arguments than the same approach for filling in the values applies to all the --twitter-* and --telegram-access-token optional arguments.

4. Fill in bot's required argument(s) (<ids>). It should be a string with a digit form of twitter id on the left and telegram channel id on the right delimited with : (colon).

   • Twitter account id is an id in digit form, to convert your @twitterid to digit form you can use this website.
   • Telegram channel id is the id in form @telegramchannelid.

   This required argument (<ids>) can be repeated multiple times. E.g.:

   php ttt manage "1111:@telegram1" "2222:@telegram2" "3333:@telegram3"

Development

If you want to build from source or to help the project and fix some bugs or add some features you can leverage the Dockerfile included within the project.

1. Run docker-compose up -d in terminal.
2. Run docker-compose exec app sh to log in to the container.
3. If you want to build the app then run php ttt app:build <your-build-name>.
4. The build will be in the build folder.

Adding new Pipelines (handlers)

If you want to add some custom handlers for the tweets, e.g. add some text to it or remove possibility to post images to Telegram channel than you can add your own Pipelines.

Pipelines lie in Pipelines folder and there you can add you own PipelineFactory to handle your tweets as you see fit. PipelineFactory has a chain of Pipes to handle tweet content.

The default behaviour for tweet handling lies in DefaultPipelineFactory.

Each Pipeline consists of Pipes that handle different parts of the tweet and changes the main DataHub object. Depending on whether tweet has some media (like videos, gifs, photos) or not, it changes DataHub object to represent what the resulting TelegramPayload will be. It's sort of like Chain of Responsibility pattern.

For example if you want to add something to the text or format it somehow you can add your custom Pipe after default TextPipe to format the text as you want.

The config/pipelines.php configuration file has a map of pipelines. When you add your new Pipeline you need to register it in this file with your custom name. Right now it has only on pipeline called 'default'.

In order to use custom Pipeline you need to add another optional argument to the bot when running it. The format with this argument is the same as with the required argument: telegram id to the left and pipeline name from pipelines.php file to the right delimited with : (colon). E.g.:

php ttt manage 1111:@telegramchannelid --channel-pipeline=1111:customPipelineName

Stuff to add

• Unit Tests
• Feature Tests
• Logging
• Polls