Manny Talk Plugin Telegram Bot

This is a plugin for the https://github.com/daangemist/manny-talk project. The Telegram bot API is used as a client for input.

Configuration

Follow the instructions on the Telegram bot API explanation page to acquire a token for your bot. Place that token in your plugin configuration, for example:

{
  "token": "<token goes here>",
  "password": "genie"
}

If you use the Manny Talk global configuration, use:

{
  "plugins": {
    "telegram": {
      "token": "..."
    }
  }
}

The password configuration attribute is optional, and can be used to require a password before someone can send input via the Telegram bot.

To not require a password, simply remove the attribute or set it to null.

All options

Attribute	Type	Required	Description
token	string	yes	The Telegram bot token to connect to the bot API.
password	string	no	Require a password from someone before input is accepted.
allowedChatIds	string[]	no	Pre allow specific chat Identifiers, they do not require a password. Only works in combination with the password attribute.
maxKeyboardWidth	number	no	The maximum number of characters allowed in the horizontal row of an Inline Keyboard. Is used for quick replies. If this number of characters is reached a new row will be created. Default value is 25.

Setup

Manny Talk can run both standalone of as part of an existing application as a module.

Module

When using Manny Talk as a module, do:

npm i --save @manny-talk/manny-talk-plugin-telegram-bot

Then, in your application do:

import telegramBot from '@manny-talk/manny-talk-plugin-telegram-bot';

// ... other code, initialization of Manny Talk as `const mannyTalk = ...`
mannyTalk.addPlugin('plugin', telegramPlugin);

// Or if you do not have the configuration in the global Manny Talk configuration at initialization:
mannyTalk.addPlugin('plugin', telegramPlugin);

In plain javascript:

const telegramBot = require('@manny-talk/manny-talk-plugin-telegram-bot');

// ... other code, initialization of Manny Talk as `const mannyTalk = .
mannyTalk.addPlugin('plugin', telegramPlugin.default);

Standalone

When running Manny Talk as a standalone server install the plugin at the plugin location. At the plugin location ($HOME/.manny-talk by default), execute:

npm install --save @manny-talk/manny-talk-plugin-telegram-bot

Then, add the telegram configuration in the plugins attribute of the Manny Talk configuration and restart the server.

Troubleshooting

This plugin uses debug to log debug output. The prefix used is manny-talk:plugin:telelegram-bot. To see the output, set the environment variable DEBUG=manny-talk:plugin:telelegram-bot:*.

Development

This plugin is part of the Manny Talk mono repo at github.

To build this plugin, run: npm run build. To continuously build this plugin, run npm run watch.

To test whether it's working, configure an environment variable TOKEN that contains the Telegram bot token to test with. For example:

export TOKEN=466931xxx:AAGKPfVjWyEOq3kIqIO1BP3u8Uxxx
npm run test

Docker

When using the docker-compose.yml in the repository root, run that using: docker-compose up. This will start up npm run watch for the manny-talk-core package. Open a second shell and run docker-compose exec node bash to open a shell into the running container. Use cd packages/manny-talk-plugin-telegram-bot to be able to execute command on this plugin.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome. This does not necessarily have to be code, it can also be updated documentation, tutorials, bug reports or pull requests.

Please create an Issue to propose a feature you want to implement, so that the details can be discussed in advance.

Open Items / Todo

• Implement telegram webhook for messages (once manny-talk-core supports http/express).