Signal Multicast Bot

This project makes use of a Postgres database and signal-cli to create a service similar to what moderated mailing lists provided some years ago, but on Signal:

• administrators create lists
• users subscribe to them or are added by administrators
• administrators send messages which are distributed to all subscribers

Signal already has groups, but this is made for announcement-like communication. The users don't know who else is on the list, and everyone gets the messages in a one-to-one chat.

Bot commands

Basic (everyone can send these commands to the bot)

bot help
bot subscribe <GROUPNAME> <PARTICIPANT NAME>
bot unsubscribe <GROUPNAME>

Administrative (only select people can use these commands)

bot listgroups
bot addgroup <GROUPNAME>
bot removegroup <GROUPNAME>
bot list <GROUPNAME>
bot add <GROUPNAME> <PARTICIPANT PHONE NUMBER WITHOUT SPACES> <PARTICIPANT NAME>
bot remove <GROUPNAME> <PARTICIPANT NAME OR NUMBER>
bot send <GROUPNAME> <SOME TEXT>

Examples

bot subscribe Testgroup Steven Miller
bot addgroup Testgroup
bot add Testgroup 017912345678 Some Dude
bot send Testgroup This message should be sent!

Get started

1. If you don't have a Postgres instance yet, create one.
2. If you don't run signal-cli as DBus service yet, set it up now.
3. Checkout this project to your computer (or just copy main.py, database.py and config-template.ini).
4. Copy config-template.ini to config.ini and edit it so it contains the phone number(s) you want to use and the correct database credentials.
5. Call main.py with at least Python 3.6 installed.