Automated Telegram News Summary Bot

⚡ Instantly summarize global news inside Telegram — 100% free, private, and local. Built with Python + TextRank.

Free, local-first Telegram bot that fetches news via RSS feeds and returns concise extractive summaries for user-selected topics.

No paid APIs required. Summarization is extractive (TextRank) and runs locally.

Features

• Topic selection via inline buttons (technology, world, business, sports, science, health, entertainment)
• Fetches from reputable RSS feeds (no paid APIs)
• Extractive summarization (TextRank) – fully free, no external LLM API
• Simple JSON storage for per-user topic preferences

Tech stack

• Python 3.10+
• python-telegram-bot (async, v21)
• feedparser, trafilatura (fetch + extract article content)
• sumy (TextRank summarizer)
• dotenv for configuration

Setup

1. Create a bot with BotFather and obtain your bot token.

2. Environment variables (keep secrets out of git):

   • Copy env.sample to .env
   • Set TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN in .env
   • Note: .env is ignored by .gitignore so your token isn’t committed

3. Create a virtual environment and install dependencies:

python -m venv .venv
.venv\Scripts\activate  # Windows PowerShell
pip install -r requirements.txt

4. Run the bot:

python -m src.main

Usage

• /start to begin and choose your topics
• /topics to update your preferences
• /latest to get summarized headlines for your selected topics
• /help list all commands
• /setlatestcount <n> set articles per topic for /latest (1-10)
• /setdailycount <n> set articles per topic for daily digest (1-10)
• /schedule <morning|evening|night> pick your daily digest time
• /subscribe start receiving the daily digest automatically
• /unsubscribe stop receiving the daily digest

Open source: how to contribute

Contributions are welcome! Please:

• Open an issue for bugs/feature requests
• Submit PRs with a clear description and minimal changes
• Keep code readable and documented where non-obvious

Local run and dev

python -m src.main

Deploy (free-friendly options)

• Render/OCI/Hetzner/Fly.io free tiers
• Use polling or set up webhooks; ensure the process stays alive

Security notes

• Never commit .env; the file is ignored by default
• Rotate tokens if accidentally exposed

License

MIT

Topics

python, telegram-bot, automation, news, rss, nlp, text-summarization, textrank, open-source, local-first, bot-development, python-telegram-bot, asyncio, free-api, news-aggregator

Notes

• Summaries are extractive using TextRank; no paid API keys are needed
• The default feed set is curated but you can add/change RSS feeds in src/news.py
• User preferences are stored in data/users.json

Optional (free hosting suggestions)

• Fly.io, Deta Space, or Render free tiers can run this
• For hosting, add a Procfile and keep the process alive; also consider webhook mode instead of polling