Plane Spotting Telegram Bot

Introduction

Since I am an avgeek and plane spotter, I use Flightradar24 like everyone else, but I am missing some features.

• First of all, even though flightradar has an alert system, it does not track flights with flight number N/A. This is a problem for me since almost all An-124s have little to no flight information.
• Secondly it doesn't notify about scheduled flights I am interested in.

Of course, there may be simpler solutions to these problems, but I decided to create my own in the form of a Telegram bot. The bot is able to notify about all flying An-124s, as well as about all wide-body aircraft (and Boeing 757) that will make a scheduled flight to the airport of your choice. Also, you can select 1 to 5 specific aircraft, and you will only receive notifications about them. And if you want to receive notifications only about wide-body flights or only about An-124s, you can always change the bot mode.

Project deployed, and you can try it out here.

An-124 and Wide-body flight notification example

More notification examples you can find here.

Main Bot Commands

• /changeairport - Change your airport by Iata or Icao code.
• /currentairport - Get your current airport name and Iata code.
• /changemode - Change bot mode.
  • All - You will receive notifications about An-124 flights and wide-body aircraft flights.
  • Wide-body - You will receive notifications only for wide-body aircraft.
  • An-124 - You will receive notifications only about An-124 flights.
  • Mute - You will not receive any notifications.
• /selectaircraft - Select from 1 to 5 specific aircraft.
• /chosenaircraft - Get your chosen aircraft.
• /currentmode - Get current bot mode.
• /changeunits - Change System of Units.
• /lang - Change bot language
  • English
  • Ukrainian
  • Russian
• /feedback - Send feedback.
• /setemail - Add email to send you mail if An-124 in your airport.
• /myemail - Get your email.
• /removeemail - Remove your email from the bot.

Installation

1. Install Docker here.

2. Create a Telegram bot using BotFather.

3. Create Geonames account here.

4. Create an account and an application in Better Stack.

5. Create an .env file

   API_KEY=YOUR_RANDOM_API_KEY
   API_URL=http://localhost:8000
   API_DOCKER_URL=http://flightradar-api:8000
   
   GEONAMES_URL=http://api.geonames.org/searchJSON
   GEONAMES_USERNAME=YOUR_GEONAMES_USERNAME
   
   BOT_NAME=YOUR_BOT_NAME
   BOT_TOKEN=YOUR_TOKEN
   BOT_CREATOR_ID=YOUR_TELEGRAM_USER_ID
   
   POSTGRES_HOST=avgeek_bot_postgres
   POSTGRES_DOCKER_PORT=YOUR_DOCKER_PORT
   POSTGRES_USER=YOUR_POSTGRES_USER
   POSTGRES_PASSWORD=YOUR_POSTGRES_PASSWORD
   POSTGRES_DB=YOUR_DB_NAME
   
   MONGO_HOST=avgeek-admin-mongo
   MONGO_PORT=27017
   MONGO_DATABASE=YOUR_MONGO_DATABASE
   MONGO_USERNAME=YOUR_MONGO_USERNAME
   MONGO_PASSWORD=YOUR_MONGO_PASSWORD
   
   RABBITMQ_USERNAME=YOUR_RABBITMQ_USERNMAE
   RABBITMQ_PASSWORD=YOUR_RABBITMQ_PASSWORD
   RABBITMQ_HOST=localhost
   RABBITMQ_DOCKER_HOST=avgeek-rabbitmq
   
   MAIL_USERNAME=YOUR_BOT_EMAIL_ADDRESS
   MAIL_PASSWORD=YOUR_BOT_EMAIL_PASSWORD
   
   ADMIN_SERVER_URL=http://bot-admin-panel:8888
   ADMIN_USERNAME=YOUR_ADMIN_USERNAME
   ADMIN_PASSWORD=YOUR_ADMIN_PASSWORD
   
   CLIENT_USERNAME=YOUR_AVGEEK_CLIENT_USERNAME
   CLIENT_PASSWORD=YOUR_AVGEEK_CLIENT_PASSWORD
   
   APPLICATION_HOST=YOUR_ADMIN_APPLICATION_HOST
   
   GITHUB_REPOSITORY_URL=LINK_TO_YOUR_REPOSITORY
   
   LOGGING_TOKEN=YOUR_BETTER_STACK_TOKEN
   BETTER_STACK_LINK=https://logs.betterstack.com
   TIMEZONE=Europe/London

   All Timezones you can find here.

6. Run the application in Docker:

   docker compose up --build -d