Telegram-RSS-Bot

A bot helps to subscribe to rss sources, and organise and post in channels/chats.

To use the bot, you need to start your own bot and build your own server. This readme will provide a step-by-step very concise guide.

How To Start

• Create a telegram bot. Please refer to the official guild. In short, talk to BotFather and say "/newbot".
• Start a server on Heroku. Heroku is a cloud platform you can build apps on. It's free tier should be enough for your own use. There are definitely more options but this guide will only cover Heroku.
• Create an account here, and verify by adding a credit card to the account (for the bot to work, you will need some add-ons, and you have to verify with your credit card, but they won't charge you).
• Create an app.
• Add Heroku Redis and Heroku Scheduler to your app.
• Under "Deploy", choose a deployment method that suits you and follow the instructions.
• Under "Settings -> Config Vars", add a variable WEBHOOK_TOKEN (refer to here). You can use a long, randomly generated string (recommended!), as you won't need it elsewhere.
• Similarly, add BOT_TOKEN, which should be found when you create your bot.
• Then, add HEROKU_APP_NAME, the name of your application, or enable Dyno Metadata.
• In a Heroku console, run the shell script scripts/set_webhook.sh. You can start a Heroku console with Heroku CLI or under "More -> Run console" on your app dashboard.
• In Telegram, add your bot to some groups/channels and promote the bot as an administrator. You should at least allow the bot to post messages.
• Check the chats information with http://YOUR-APP.heroku.com/getChats and prepare your myconfig.yml.
• Create a myconfig.yml similar to simple_config.yml (simple version) or config.yml (complete version) and run locally the shell script scripts/update_config.sh. Alternatively, you can configure your bot via telegram (TODO (maybe...))
• Add a job python scripts/fetch.py to your Heroku Scheduler

APIs

• /getChats: Get information of all chats (groups, channels, private chats, ...) your bot can post messages to. Use the chat_id to configure your bot.
• /getConfig: Get the current configuration.
• /setConfig: Set a new configuration.
• /updateHook: Not for humans :). The bot's update hook. Any updates will send a request to this interface.