WüSpace Telegram Reminder Bot

A Telegram bot for sending reminders in group channels.

This bot makes reminders hard-coded, meaning channel members can't change them, allowing its use in untrusted group channels.

Deployment

1. Clone the repo
2. Run npm ci
3. Run cp .env.example .env
4. Insert your telegram bot token into the .env file as TELEGRAM_TOKEN.
5. Run npm run deploy. This runs the bot using forever. Learn more about forever.

Your bot is now running and ready to configure.

Configuring the bot

1. Add the bot to the desired group channel.
2. Run /start on the bot (in group channels, use /start@bot_username). The bot tells you your chat's ID.
3. Insert the chat id as PR_CHAT_ID into the .env file.
4. Run npm run deploy:restart to restart the bot with the chat ID enabled.

The bot is now active and will send reminders as configured in the reminders.js file.

Updating reminders

You can set up the reminders in the reminders.js file. It consists of an array of objects that each contain a cron field (the CRON expression) and a message field (the message that gets sent on the CRON schedule) as well as an array of the chat IDs the reminder gets sent to.

Update the file (you can use the web tool CronTab to build your CRON expression) and set the message that should get sent. After that, just run npm run deploy:restart and the new reminder gets used.

Development Environment

Essentially the same as the deployment workflow (clone the repo, install dependencies with npm ci, create the .env and insert the TELEGRAM_TOKEN). But instead of running npm run deploy, use npm start during development for easier debugging capabilities.