Telegram Pi Bot

About

This is my personal Telegram Bot to run on my RaspberryPi 2 at home. It's supposed to be a proxy and an easy interface for all the home automation paraphernalia that we might end up getting in the future.

Features

• Answers to only pre-configured chat rooms
• Webhooks configured via a JSON config file
  • Configures an endpoint to call for a given command
  • Works great with IFTTT Maker channel
• Basic multilingual support
  • en pt-br
• Runs on Python 3

Setup

Hardware requirements

• RaspberryPi
• Power cable
• MicroSD card
• Internet connection

Installing things

This is a guide for the complete setup on ArchLinux, if you're just intested in running the script you can jump

Base system setup

• Install archlinux
• Add new user and change default passowrds
• Setup ssh
• Setup sudo
• Setup iptables, easier guide here (make sure to open ports for ssh and supervisor)
• systemctl enable iptables
• Configure static ip address

Python setup

• Install Python: sudo pacman -S python
• Install pip: sudo pacman -S python-pip

Process management setup

• sudo pacman -S gcc
• sudo pacman -S python-setuptools
• Get circus for process management
• sudo pip install circus
• Start circus on boot

Finally, bot setup

• sudo pip install telegram-pi-bot
• Configure a ~/circus.ini file

[circus]

[watcher:telegram-pi-bot]
cmd = telegram-pi-bot
numprocesses = 1

[env]
TELEGRAM_PI_BOT_CONFIG = /home/username/config.json

• Setup the json config file

Maintenance

• sudo pacman -Syu Updates the system

Running the bot

Config file

Telegram Pi Bot is configured through a json file, in which you can set your bot token and configure webhooks/commands to invoke from your bot.

Here is an example of what a config.json file looks like:

{
    "bot_token": "<insert bot token>",
    "chat_ids": [
        "<insert chat id in which the bot should respond to>"
    ],
    "language": "<bot language>",
    "webhooks": [
        {
            "command_name": "dosomething",
            "url": "https://example.com/dosomething",
            "method": "POST",
            "headers": {
                "Content-Type": "application/json"
            },
            "data": { "value1": "%s" }
        }
    ]
}

Locate config file

The config file will try to be loaded from:

• A location specified using the TELEGRAM_PI_BOT_CONFIG environment variable

or

• A config.json file placed in the same folder as the main.py script

Using Circus

For improved process handling:

• systemctl start circus
• systemctl stop circus
• systemctl reload circus

Autostart on device boot:

• systemctl enable circus

Script

Clone this repo, then cd into its folder.

To just simply run as a Python script, just make sure your config.json file is accessible as previously explained, then just run:

python telegram_pi_bot

License

MIT © Ruy Adorno