Attendance Bot

Simple telegram bot to remind checking attendance. Personally helpful because since all classes become online during corona pandemic, so are all classes attendance. Build using python and implements multithreading.

Available Commands

• /start, shows welcome message
• /help, shows how to use
• /subscribe, register to receive all notifications
• /unsubscribe, unregister to remove all notifications
• /once, register a one-time event with format. The format is /once <event_name> <event_time>. <event_name> can be a long string, while <event_time> must be in HH:MM 24-hour clock format

All the messages can be configured. See Configuration section.

Configurations

In order to use this bot, first configure the environment variables. See the .env.example file.

• API_TOKEN, fill it with your Telegram API Token you generated. See here to generate API Token.
• DB_HOST, DB_USERNAME, DB_PORT are predefined, please don't change the value.
• DB_PASSWORD, fill with desired database password.
• DB_NAME, fill with desired database name you want to use.
• DB_POOL_SIZE, fill with the number of pooling connection you want. Recommended value is >= 2.
• DB_POOL_NAME, fill with the pool name. Can be anything.
• TZ, fill with your timezone location (e.g. Asia/Jakarta).
• SLEEP_INTERVAL, fill with time interval for the bot to check the current events based on schedule in second.
• WEBHOOK_HOST, fill with the your server IP where this code is hosted.

This branch uses webhook for getting message updates. If you want to use the polling version, switch to this branch. In order to function properly, Telegram API requires the connection to use HTTPS protocol so we need to set up certificate. You can use your own certificate (if you already have one), or simply use self-signed certificate by simply executing gen-cert.sh. More information here.

To configure the bot messages, open the messages.py file in the attbot directory and make all the changes.

Right now, all the events are still hardcoded in the database. You can insert or delete them by changing the init.sql file in the db directory. Just make sure you don't change the schema.

Deployment

First make sure you have docker and docker-compose installed on your machine since it will make this process very easy.

1. Go to the root directory and type this in terminal.

cp .env.example .env

2. Fill out the .env file according to the Configurations guidelines.
3. Build the docker image.

docker-compose build

4. Finally start the service.

docker-compose up -d

Wait for a couple minutes. If all goes well, you should be able to interact with your telegram bot.

Credits

Steve Immanuel

September 2020