Lotb

One bot to rule them all, one bot to find them, one bot to bring them all and in the darkness run them. 💍

Why❓

Several years ago telegram introduced the Bot API, and since then, I have used it to automate tasks and send notifications to my groups.

While the python-telegram-bot library has been my go-to choice, I often found myself reinventing the wheel for each bot I created or used from others' projects. I also had to update all my bots whenever telegram introduced new features or changed its implementation.

To eliminate this pain and save time, I decided to develop a more dry approach for my bots. This system is plugin-based and it shares a common core logic, making it easier to define new bots with just a few lines of code.

Features ✨

• Plugins based: you can enable or disable plugins either at runtime or in the config
• Each plugin has its own config entry and entry in the config can be overridden by the env var (useful for secrets)
• Built-in helper methods to:
  • create, register and run bot commands
  • intercept messages based on a regex and run a callback
  • use sqlite to store data
  • reply to messages or quoted messages
  • support for internal logs
  • schedule tasks for your plugin using the job queue scheduler
  • support for job queue scheduler so you can schedule tasks for your plugin
  • auth: define a list of users or authorize specific groups to interact with the bot
• Great test coverage (> 70%) ✅

How to use it? 📦

• Clone this repo (will probably be published on pypi in the future)
• Install the dependencies with poetry
• Create a new bot on telegram and get the token
• Create a config file, see config.example.toml, the base is something like this:

[core]
database = "lotb.db" # path to the sqlite database
admins = [''] # list of telegram user ids that can interact with the bot
debug = "false" # set to true to enable debug logs

• Run the bot

poetry install
poetry run lotb --config config.toml

Docker 🐳

You can also run the bot using docker, the registry is ghcr.io/brokenpip3/lotb, just create a config file and mount it in the container:

docker run -v $(pwd)/config.toml:/config.toml ghcr.io/brokenpip3/lotb:0.0.1 --config /config.toml

or you can also find a docker-compose example in the docker-compose-example.yaml file.

Plugins 🔌

By default, the bot will load all the plugins in the lotb/plugins directory. You can disable a plugin by removing it from the plugins list in the config file. You can also make the bot load a plugin from a different directory by passing another path to the core.plugins_additional_directory key in the config file.

Available plugins

Be aware that these are the plugins that I wrote for my own use, and they may or may not be useful for you.

• Welcome: Just an example plugin that will reply to a welcome message
• RSSfeed: A plugin that will fetch a list of rss feeds and send the new entries every X minutes:

  [plugins.rssfeed]
  enabled = true # enable or disable the plugin
  chatid = "" # the chat id where the bot will send the messages
  interval = "30" # the interval in seconds
  feeds = [
      {name = "mullvad", url = "https://mullvad.net/en/blog/feed/atom/"},
  ] # list of feeds

• Prometheus_alerts: A plugin that will fetch and send the alerts from a prometheus server:

  [plugins.prometheus_alerts]
  enabled = true # enable or disable the plugin
  chatid = "" # the chat id where the bot will send the messages
  alertmanager_url = "https://my.prometheus.server" # the url of the prometheus server
  alert_interval = 1 # the interval in minutes

• Readwise: A plugin that will let you add the quoted url in your Readwise reader account:

  [plugins.readwise]
  enabled = true # enable or disable the plugin
  token = "your_token" # can be also set as env var: LOTB_PLUGINS_READWISE_TOKEN

• Notes: A plugin that will let you save notes in sqlite and retrieve them later:

  [plugins.notes]
  enabled = true # enable or disable the plugin

• Memo: A plugin that will let you save memos based on regex or the first word and save it in separate files. For each category, the plugin will save the memo in a different file automatically by starting the message with the category name, for instance: todo: buy milk will save the memo in the todo file:

  [plugins.memo]
  generic = "path/to/generic/memo" # path to the generic memo file
  todo = "path/to/todo" # path to the todo memo file
  book = "" # path to the book memo file
  series = "" # path to the series memo file
  film = "" # path to the film memo file

• Image: A plugin that will let you save image ids in sqlite and call it in a group chat with imagename.img or search for images with /image search term using Unsplash:

  [plugins.image]
  accesskey = "your_access_key" # can be also set as env var: LOTB_PLUGINS_IMAGE_ACCESSKEY
  secretkey = "your_secret_key" # can be also set as env var: LOTB_PLUGINS_IMAGE_SECRETKEY

How to add a plugin? What helper methods are available?

Check CONTRIBUTING.md

Credits 🙏

• Thanks to the python-telegra-bot dev team for the great library
• Thanks DALL-E for the great logo
• This repo has been initialized with:

nix flake init -t github:brokenpip3/my-flake-templates#python-poetry