telegram

Arquiyalt Telegram Bot

Table Of Contents

• Development
• Environment variables
• Add new command
  • Define command
  • Create handler
  • Link handler
  • Update bot command list Optional
• Contributors

Development

Clone the repo and cd to Telegram directory

yarn
yarn dev

Environment variables

variable	default	use
API_URI	localhost:3000	api url
TOKEN	485892696:AAHOHg3Sk2CNUt_ArGuv09qxGv9eqJuiY78	telegram bot token
API_TELEGRAM_SECRET	apitelegramsecret	secret key shared between api and telegram

Add new command

In order to add a new command to the telegram bot 3 steps must be completed

1. Define the command key, summary and description
2. Create a handler for the command
3. Link the command with it's handler
4. Update bot in-chat command list Optional

How to do so?

Define command

Open up constants and define your new command. You must edit COMMAND and COMMAND_DESCRIPTION.

On COMMAND you have to define a key: value pair where key is how the command will be referenced on the project's code (Ej: COMMAND.help), value is the string that users will have to type to invoke this command (Ej: /help).

On COMMAND_DESCRIPTION you define the summary and description of the command. In order to do so you have to use the same key you defined on COMMAND (Ej: [COMMAND.help]: { summary: '', description: ''}). summary is the command definition that will be shown on chat when a user types /. description will be shown when the /help command is invoked (or /help yourCommand).

Create handler

Go to commands and create a new file for your command. Use the same key you defined on COMMAND for this file's name (Ej: help.js). This is just convention. Go ahead and copy and paste this code:

const invoke = async ctx => {
  return ctx.sendMarkdown(`The command ${ctx.command.name} was invoked`)
}

const answer = async ctx => {
  return ctx.sendMarkdown(`The command ${ctx.command.name} was answered`)
}

module.exports = async bot => bot.invoke(invoke).answer(answer)

invoke will be called when the command is invoked (Ej: /help). answer will be called when a user types after invoking a command (Ej: /products and then typing 1 2 3 will show products 1, 2 and 3). Both functions must return a Promise. sendMarkdown is a function that renders whatever string you pass it to markdown (created by the markdown middleware). You can use axios here to communicate with the api. It's already configured with the baseUrl and Secret header. You can just:

const axios = require('axios')
axios.get('/products')  // Will fetch all products from api

Link handler

Open configCommands and link your newly created command handler with it's command key. Edit the configCommand Object adding your command key (Ej: COMMAND.help) and it's handler (Ej: require('./commands/help')) defining their connection (Ej: [COMMAND.help]: require('./commands/help')).

And you're done! You should be able to use your new command talking to the bots

Beware that currently we're working with only one bot (one token) so the production bot may answer your commands. You can check if a response comes from the dev bot if it's message starts with DEV.

Update bot command list

Optional

In order for the bot to show all available commands when writing / on a telegram chat we must update the command list with botfather. In order to do so @negebauer must talk to botfather. Run yarn botfather on this folder and send the output to http://telegram.me/negebauer.

Contributors:

• @negebauer
• @fnmendez