IRC bot to Telegram: a bot that allows using Telegram from IRC
[ Note: this project is not longer maintained ]
[ Media branch is stable and is the default ]
ibotg acts as a gateway between IRC and Telegram chat/messaging network.
It works connecting to a Telegram account and mapping every contact and group on Telegram to a user and channel on a IRC server.
ibotg is written in Tcl with a small Lua wrapper to telegram-cli.
See diagram.
- Tcl with picoirc library.
- telegram-cli with an account configured (optionally from my fork to use history function, see "Telegram-cli with history callbacks" section)
- An IRC server, private recommended but can be public if it allows the requeriments of ibotg (see Notes section)
- An IRC client.
- Some means to access to the media files (see media support section).
For configuring ibotg complete the config file, it's self documented, the directives are in the format key=value.
By now ibotg cannot retrieve the contact list nor group list from telegram-cli, in fact some users can be in a group talking with its members without having them as contacts, so ibotg needs two text files: one for the contact list and another for the group/channel list. The format of them is as follows:
contact list:
One line per contact with four data separated by colons:
ircnick:telegram_name:username:channels
- ircnick: the nick shown in IRC (normally max 9 characters, no spaces).
- telegram_name: the name of the contact as appears on Telegram (spaces replaced by underscores "_").
- username: optional public username (also known as alias) that can be set
in a Telegram account, in the form @username, al mentions in messages to
these aliases will be replaced by the ircnick in the form
ircnick. If you don't like this feature just leave the username empty. - channels: comma separated list of channels on IRC corresponding to Telegram groups where the contact is, the name of the group on Telegram will be defined in the group/channel list file.
Examples:
root:::#farwest,#saloon
unknown:::#farwest,#saloon
echo:Your_name:@your_alias:#farwest,#saloon
media:media::
prsai:John_Wayne:@Duke:#farwest,#saloon
There are four special contacts in ibotg that must be present in contact list:
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root user: internal control user managed by ibotg that has two functions: receive messages from a channel to forward them to Telegram and, via
private messages, pass commands directly to telegram-cli and return its output. This contact has no presence in Telegram network so the telegram_name and username should be empty. It must be in all channels. -
unknown user: it's the user on IRC that maps any Telegram user that is not in the contact file (will show the Telegram name into brackets). This contact has no presence in Telegram network so the telegram_name and username should be empty. It must be in all channels.
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echo user: it's your user on Telegram that must be mapped in IRC for echo messages (if enabled) and history logs, it must be different from master user (see Running section).
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media user: it's the user on IRC that shows media URLs (see media support section) for history messages (via private messages), as it's not possible to show the URLs inline (by each contact) as on regular messages. Both ircnick and telegram_name must be the same, username should be empty.
channel list:
One line per group/channel with two data separated by colon:
Group_name:#channel
- Group_name: Name of the group as shown in Telegram (with spaces replaced by underscores "_").
- #channel: The name of the IRC channel when the corresponding group will be mapped.
Examples:
The_Far_West:#farwest
Western_Saloon:#saloon
Another file you should adapt to your system is "tg", this is the script ibotg uses to launch telegram-cli with all the necessary options, you can change variables TG_PATH with the path to the telegram-cli executable and PUB_PATH with the path to the Telegram publick key file "tg-server.pub".
If you want to use the history function of telegram-cli in ibotg (including "last" command, see Running section) you must use my own fork of telegram-cli that adds history callbacks.
Follow the usual intructions to compile telegram-cli.
Simply launch ibotg from its directory and keep it in background, you can provide an optional config file, if not "config" in the current directory will be used.
./ibotg [config_file] &
On IRC you will see all the contacts joining their channels, the user configured as master (normally the user you use with your IRC client) is authorized to have the messages forwarded to telegram-cli and will be the target from private messages.
A control user (configured as root user in tribute to bitlbee) will send the non-message output from telegram-cli to master user and will forward commands to telegram-cli, I suggest you keep the root user in a separated window query in your IRC client.
Some special commands can be sent to the control user (root) prefixed with exclamation mark (!). At the moment the following commands are available:
!last <user|channel>
This will produce a dump of messages from history according to the number of
unread messages reported by "dialog_list" command from telegram-cli. You can
reset the unread message count with telegram-cli command "mark_read <contact|channel>". This only works if you use the forked version of
telegram-cli as said above.
!chcon <ircnick> <telegram_name> [username|-]
For the contact refered by ircnick, change the telegram_name and
username/alias. If you omit the username it will be set to empty, if you set
"-" it will be left unchanged with the previous value that already had.
This is usefull when some contact changes its name in Telegram, it will be
shown in ibotg as unknown until you set the new name with chcon, similarly
the username/alias affects the conversion from @username to irnick forms.
You must update the contact list file with the new telegram_name and/or
username of the contact as well because the changes made with chcon will not
be persistent if ibotg is restarted.
!chgrp <#channel> <telegram_group>
For the channel refered (usually starting with #) change the group on Telegram that is linked with. Like with !chcon, the changes made are not persistent so you should update the channel list file.
!chcon and !chgrp commands are useful when the name of contacts or groups on Telegram change, you can change them in ibotg in runtime to make it work properly.
!list
Will show the list of the live contacts that ibotg keeps, including the changes made by "!chcon" command in runtime.
When sending commands to telegram-cli via the control user (root), when you have to refer to a contact you normally use its telegram_name, now you can use shortcuts for convenience with the follow syntax:
command !<ircnick>
For example:
user_info !prsai
Suposing that the contact with ircnick "prsai" has telegram_name "John_Wayne", ibotg will convert the previous command to:
user_info John_Wayne
As telegram-cli needs the telegram_name.
Similary, in a channel, you can refer to a contact with the following syntax:
!<ircnick>:
ibotg will convert this to the alias/username of the contact with the ircnick refered, in the form @alias. In telegram this will notify the user mentioned.
Support only for photos (by now): telegram-cli saves every photo to the downloads local folder ($HOME/.telegram-cli/downloads) if you are running telegram-cli/ibotg on your PC you just have to open the files with your favourite image viewer. If you are running telegram-cli/ibotg on a server, you should share the downloads folder via http, ftp, gopher, NFS, CIFS or another protocol/service that allows you to access to the files remotely.
As an alternative you can sync the files with rsync, S3, etc. so you can access them from other location.
In order to ease the operation, ibotg constructs the final URL according to a base URL and the filename reported by telegram-cli, regular messages show their URLs inline, the URLs in history messages are shown by the virtual user "media".
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TLS/SSL conections to IRC are not supported (a limitation from picoirc library), if you run a private IRC server I suggest you run ibotg on the same host (serv=localhost). If you need TLS/SSL you can deploy a tunnel or bouncer/proxy like stunnel or znc. Connection to Telegram is handled by telegram-cli so is secured by MTProto.
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If you run ibotg on public IRC server you may experience some problems like being rejected/banned due to antibot policies, limit of number of connections, and/or antiflood measures. Also the nicks/channels created by the bot can collide with existing ones on IRC and/or can be registered by other users (at the moment ibotg doesn't support nick bots like "NickServ"), finally public servers can arise some privacy concerns; for all these reasons I recommend running your own private IRC server, ibotg has been heavily tested with ngircd.
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Initial pending messages are causing some problems to ibotg so they are disabled by default, instead I recommend you use history command from telegram-cli (using my fork, see "Telegram-cli with history callbacks" section). If you want to enable them at your own risk set PENDING_MSGS=1 in "tg" file.
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Make contact list dynamic/live [partially done].
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Address some synchronization problems [not experienced for some time].
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Via github project.
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#ibotg on irc.freenode.net
Copyright (C) 2015,2016 E. Bosch
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