ResourcesBot

Telegram Bot to make a browseable directory of the online resources of an organization.

Features:

• Static list of links to web pages, social networks, telegram groups, etc.
• Grouped in hierarchical menus.
• Add a /directory command for interactively browsing the catalog.
• Ability to define different menus for each Telegram group.

Usage

First, register a new bot with @BotFather as explained here.

• You only are required to set the bot name and description, and recommended a bot profile picture. Take note of the assigned token.

• Perhaps you want to register a bot for private use while configuring it and a public one for real use. You can delete the private one after finishing.

Clone this repo and install dependencies with

npm install

Copy the /src/config.ts.example to src/config.ts and modify it as you wish. You need to enter at least the token you got in the first step.

Run the bot with

npm start

If everything is ok, you will see a message saying the app is running, and you should be able to use the bot by connecting to the address that @Botfather gave you (https://t.me/your_bot).

Deploy

To deploy the bot to a production server, first change the bot key in config.ts file, if necessary. Then compile it withhttps://pm2.keymetrics.io/hthttps://pm2.keymetrics.io/tps://pm2.keymetrics.io/

npm run build

And copy the contents of the dist/ directory to the server. You can run it with

npm install node-telegram-bot-api
node index.js

But we recommend to use pm2. Install it as explained in the documentation and then execute this in the bots directory:

pm2 start --name your_bot index.js
pm2 startup systemd
 (copy and paste the sudo command, to install pm2 as a global service)
pm2 save
 (to registar the bot to be restarted when it fails)

There are some useful commands to monitorize the bot state:

pm2 list
pm2 monit
pm2 logs --lines 100

Documentation

Official telegram bots api documentation

• https://core.telegram.org/bots

• https://core.telegram.org/bots/api

Tutorials to create Telegram bots

• https://github.com/hosein2398/node-telegram-bot-api-tutorial

• https://tecnonucleous.com/creacion-de-bots-de-telegram-en-nodejs

Node Telegram Bot API client reference

• https://www.npmjs.com/package/node-telegram-bot-api

• https://github.com/yagop/node-telegram-bot-api/blob/release/doc/api.md

PM2 tool

To manage a production setup of a nodejs app.

• https://pm2.keymetrics.io/

Tsdx

To generate the app skeleton.

• https://tsdx.io/

NP

To publish node packages

• https://github.com/sindresorhus/np