CareBot

A simple Telegram bot that assists in pairing volunteers with a VWO that aligns with their interest.

Installation

Firstly, clone this repository onto your machine by running git clone https://github.com/asdfghjkxd/CareBot, or by clicking the green Code button, and selecting Download ZIP, followed by extracting the ZIP file to the desired location on your machine.

Next, create a .env file and place your secret Telegram API key in it, or modify the existing file .secrets.env with your Telegram API key.

To access this key in the code in bot.py, replace the filename with the name of your .env file on line 15 (if you created a new .env file), and change line 19 to the name of your Telegram secret API key in your .env file, as seen below:

An example .env file should look like this:

TELEGRAM_API_KEY=YOUR_KEY_HERE

If you do not wish to store your API key in the .env file, you may instead choose to store your environment variable in your instance of your Terminal instead. To do so, run the command:

export YOUR_ENV_VAR_NAME=API_KEY

on a Linux-based system or

$env:YOUR_ENV_VAR_NAME = API_KEY

on a Windows system, and comment out line 15 of bot.py, and replace the variable name in line 19 to YOUR_ENV_VAR_NAME instead.

After doing so, run the command pip install -r requirements.txt to install all requirements of this project. You should be doing this in a properly configured Python environment (venv or conda) to avoid dependency clashes.

Usage

To start the bot, simply run the command python bot.py on your Terminal. Do ensure that you have properly activated your environment by running conda activate YOUR_ENV_NAME for conda, source path/to/your/env/bin/activate on Mac/Linux systems or path\to\your\env\Scripts\activate.bat on Windows systems for venv.

Deployment

We have launched our bot on Microsoft Azure, on a Windows 10 Enterprise Virtual Machine. Our live instance of the Telegram bot can be found at the following link: Telegram Bot