Skywire Wing Commander

Note: The Skycoin Cloud logo (above) is the property of the Skycoin project.

Build Status
Master
Dev

Changelog
Credits
Overview
Wing Comamander Setup
Running Wing Commander
Stopping Wing Commander
Wing Commander Bot Commands
Known Issues
Donations

Overview

Wing Commander is a Telegram bot written in Go designed to help the Skyfleet community monitor and manage their Skyminers and associated Nodes.

This is currently a Work In Progress (WIP) and has been released as an early Alpha to select group for testing and feedback. More details will be provided as the project progresses.

Please note that this is not an official Skycoin project. If you have issues or questions - please do not bother the Skycoin or Skywire teams - raise any issues or feature requests in GitHub. Also note that this is not my job - I am doing this as an active member of the Skyfleet community and will endeavor to get back to you and resolve issues when I can. Please have patience and bare with me.

The intention of this project is to have a specialised Telegram bot application (written in Go) to run on a Skycoin Skywire (Skyminer) Manager Node and provide its owner with realtime management and monitoring capabilities.

Wing Commander Setup

This section is incomplete and requires further work. It should be sufficient however for those interested in working with the Alpha release to get it running.

Configuration File

You MUST provide a valid configuration file for the bot or it will not launch. The config file must reside in the following location $HOME\.wingcommander\config.toml

You will need to create the .wingcommander folder and then place the config.toml file into it.

cd ~
mkdir .wincommander

Refer to the provided example configution file: BigOokie\skywire-wing-commander\src\wcbot\config.example.toml file for details of all required settings. I suggest copying this as a template and then using a text editor such as nano or vi to edit the details.

Create your Bot

Initiate a Telegram chat with the @BotFather. The @BotFather is a bot provided by Telegram and will guide you through the process of creating a new Telegram account for your bot.

I won't cover specifics here - I suggest you Google it.

Once you have created a new bot, the @BotFather will provide you with details similar to the below:

@BotFather:
Done! Congratulations on your new bot. You will find it at t.me/{YOUR-BOT-NAME_bot}. 
You can now add a description, about section and profile picture for your bot, see /help for a list of commands. By the way, when you've finished creating your cool bot, ping our bot Support if you want a better username for it. Just make sure the bot is fully operational before you do this.

Use this token to access the HTTP API:
NNNNNNNNN:ABCD1234abc1_aBCD12345EFghiJK1234ab

For a description of the bot API, see this page: https://core.telegram.org/bots/api

You will need to paste the (API) token provided by the @BotFather into your config.toml file .

Suggested Bot Settings

The @BotFather allows you to control certain settings for the bot - including its ability to participate in group chats. At this stage the bot has been designed for use in private chats only. Further, I would strongly recommend not allowing it to be used by anyone other than youself or within group context.

Install and Build

The Wing Commander bot is designed to operate on your Skywire Manager Node - it is not intended or expected to function on a subordinate Node that does not run the Skywire Manager.

It is expected that you have Go v1.10.x installed. I will leave the installation of this to you. The below steps assume Go is correctly installed and your $GOPATH is correctly defined.

To get and build the code use the following commands - note paths are case-sensitive:

mkdir -p $GOPATH/src/github.com/BigOokie
cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/BigOokie
git clone https://github.com/BigOokie/skywire-wing-commander.git
cd skywire-wing-commander
go install -v ./...

Update and rebuild

To update and rebuild, use the following commands:

cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/BigOokie/skywire-wing-commander
git pull origin master 
go install -v ./...

Run Wing Commander

To run the Wing Commander bot you must have a config.toml file setup. At present, the config.toml file MUST be placed into the same folder that the wcbot application (i.e. $GOPATH/bin/). This will be moved into the users folder at some point in the future.

There is an example configuration file provided with the source (config.example.toml). Easiest way to start is to copy this and replace the required values.

Key elements you will need in the config.toml file are:

The bot token, provided by the @BotFather
Your bots ChatID.
Your Telegram @ user name (type @usernamein telegram and click on it if you don't know how to get one)

Find your ChatID

To get your ChatID go into Telegram and send a chat message to your newly created bot (it will not respond). Once you have initiated a chat with your bot, then enter the following URL into your browser:

https://api.telegram.org/bot<YourBOTToken>/getUpdates

The above URL should produce JSON output for your bot, including the ChatID. Paste your ChatID into your config.toml file.

Run as background process

To run Wing Commander as a background process (detached from the terminal):

cd $GOPATH/bin
nohup ./wcbot /dev/null 2>&1 & echo $! > wcbot.pid &

Run as forground process

To run Wing Commander as a foreground process (debug info logged to the terminal):

cd $GOPATH/bin
./wcbot

Once the Wing Commander Bot is running, start a private chat with the Bot you can make use for the commands to run it (see following section)

Stop Wing Commander

cd $GOPATH/bin
pkill -F wcbot.pid

Alternatively, if you are running Wing Commander interactively from the command line, you can press CTRL+C to shut it down gracefully.

Wing Commander Commands

This section outlines the Telegram Bot commands that are currently supported by Wing Commander:

Help
About
Status
Start
Stop

Help

/help

Provides the user with information on the commands supported by Wing Commander (listed below).

About

/about

Shows information and credits about the creator of Wing Commander and any key contributors.

Status

/status

Manually request current status of the Wing Commander Bot.

Start

/start

Wing Commander will start monitoring the Skyminer that it is running on. Once started, Wing Commander will provide notification updates via Telegram when any Node managed by the Skyminer Manager connects or disconnects. Additionally, the /start command will initiate a heartbeat which will provide a status update on a configurable cycle (interval set in config.toml). The heartbeat will help you to ensure that the bot and/or the Skyminer itself is still running. If you stop receiving the heartbeat, you need to check whats going on.

Stop

/stop

Wing Commander will stop monitoring the Skyminer. This will also stop the heartbeat.

Known Issues

The following section outlines some known issues that need to be taken into consideration by anyone running this software:

DNS level blocking/filtering of Telegram API domain on the Skywire nodes (or routers). More detail provided below.
Repository renamed. The repository has recently been renamed. It was previously skywire-telegram-notify-bot. It is now called skywire-wing-commander (note that this is case sensitive). Please make sure you update any references to the new repo name.

I have built and tested this on the following setups - but please note it is still considered ALPHA:

DIY Raspberry Pi Miner
Official Skyminer (using the official prepared images for the orange pi prime)
DIY on MacOS.

YOU TAKE FULL RESPONSIBILITY

OpenDNS Errors

If you are running OpenDNS or other DNS which protects and prevents access to certain domains, you may need to update the settings to ensure that the Telegram API domain (https://api.telegram.org) is not blocked. In OpenDNS this is blocked by the Chat and Instant message areas.

Access to the Telegram API is being blocked if you get the following error when trying to run the Bot:

PANI[0000] Post https://api.telegram.org/bot{BOTTOKEN_FROM_BOTFATHER}/getMe: x509: certificate signed by unknown authority

You can verify this by using curl. Run the following command and if you get the error shown below, the domain is being blocked. If the domain isn't blocked you should get a JSON response from Telegrams API.

curl https://api.telegram.org/bot{BOTTOKEN_FROM_BOTFATHER}/getMe

curl: (60) SSL certificate problem: unable to get local issuer certificate

Donations

This is not my job, but I enjoy building things for the Skyfleet community. If you find my work useful, please consider donating to support it.

Skycoin:    ES5LccJDhBCK275APmW9tmQNEgiYwTFKQF

BitCoin:    37rPeTNjosfydkB4nNNN1XKNrrxxfbLcMA

Asgaror/skywire-wing-commander