Subscribe HN

A Telegram bot that sends you Hacker News posts based on the topics you subscribe to.

Setup

You can create a Telegram bot by following the instructions on @Botfather.

Once you create the bot, you will receive a token to allow HTTP API access. You will need this token to get the bot up and running.

Building and Running

If you have Rust installed on your machine, you can build the binary by cloning this repo and running:

cargo build --release

You can also download the latest release here.

You must specify these environment variables to be able to run the built executable:

• TELOXIDE_TOKEN - The bot token generated while setting up the bot with @Botfather.
• CHAT_ID - The Telegram chat id. You can find your chat id by using @get_id_bot.

Once you have these details, you can run:

TELOXIDE_TOKEN=<telegram_bot_token> CHAT_ID=<telegram_chat_id> <path-to-the-binary>

If you have cloned the repo, you can run this command from the project's root directory:

TELOXIDE_TOKEN=<telegram_bot_token> CHAT_ID=<telegram_chat_id> ./target/release/subscribe_hn

Supported Commands

The bot currently supports these commands:

Command	Description
/help	List all commands along with the command description.
/subscribe <topic>	Subscribe to a topic.
/unsubscribe <topic>	Unsubscribe from a topic
/list	List all subscribed topics

Running as a systemd Service

Check the sample config file in ./config/subscribe-hn-example.service to run the bot as a systemd service.

Running with Docker

SubscribeHN comes with a pre-built Docker image. To get the bot running with Docker, run:

docker pull uint4096/subscribehn:latest
docker run -e TELOXIDE_TOKEN=<telegram_bot_token> -e CHAT_ID=<telegram_chat_id> uint4096/subscribehn:latest

Replace the latest tag with the correct semver to run older releases.

To ensure that your subscriptions are persistent, you can specify the volume while running docker run:

docker run -e TELOXIDE_TOKEN=<telegram_bot_token> -e CHAT_ID=<telegram_chat_id> -v /home_dir/subscribe_hn:/root/.config/subscribe_hn:rw uint4096/subscibehn:latest

You can also use docker compose to run the container. See ./config/docker-compose-example.yml for an example docker compose config.

License

This tool is distributed under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for more information.