/GroupButler

A Lua Telegram bot based on Otouto

Primary LanguageLuaGNU General Public License v2.0GPL-2.0

#Group Butler

##Short introduction

This bot has been created to help people administrate their groups, and includes many useful tools.

This bot was born as an otouto v3.1 (@mokubot), but it has been turned into an administration bot.

Follow the channel, or the beta channel if you want to be informed about new changes. The official (stable) bot is @GroupButler_bot. The official beta bot is @GBReborn_bot. Maybe you wanna join our support group too: [Click me to join: GroupButler Group 🇬🇧 (https://telegram.me/joinchat/EKBQLj7Zf6lE2K_Pk0Epcg)]

##Setup List of required packages:

  • libreadline-dev
  • redis-server
  • lua5.2
  • liblua5.2dev
  • libssl-dev
  • git
  • make
  • unzip
  • curl
  • libcurl4-gnutls-dev

You will need some other Lua modules too, which can be (and should be) installed through the Lua package manager LuaRocks.

Installation

# Tested on Ubuntu 14.04, Ubuntu 15.04, Debian 7, Linux Mint 17.2

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get upgrade
$ sudo apt-get install libreadline-dev libssl-dev lua5.2 liblua5.2-dev git make unzip redis-server curl libcurl4-gnutls-dev

# We are going now to install LuaRocks and the required Lua modules

$ wget http://luarocks.org/releases/luarocks-2.2.2.tar.gz
$ tar zxpf luarocks-2.2.2.tar.gz
$ cd luarocks-2.2.2
$ ./configure; sudo make bootstrap
$ sudo luarocks install luasocket
$ sudo luarocks install luasec
$ sudo luarocks install redis-lua
$ sudo luarocks install lua-term
$ sudo luarocks install serpent
$ sudo luarocks install dkjson
$ sudo luarocks install lanes
$ sudo luarocks install Lua-cURL
$ cd ..

# Clone the repository and give the launch script permissions to be executed

$ git clone https://github.com/RememberTheAir/GroupButler.git
$ cd GroupButler
$ sudo chmod 777 launch.sh

Other things to check before running the bot:

First of all, take a look at your bot settings:

• Make sure privacy is disabled (more info can be found by heading to the official Bots FAQ page). Send /setprivacy to @BotFather to check the current status of this setting.

Before you do anything else, open config.lua (in a text editor) and make the following changes:

• Set bot_api_key to the authentication token that you received from @BotFather.

• Insert your numerical Telegram ID into the superadmins table. Other superadmins can be added too. It is important that you insert the numerical ID and NOT a string.

• Set your log.chat (the ID of the chat where the bot will send all the bad requests received from Telegram) and your log.admin (the ID of the user that will receive execution errors).

Before you start the bot, you have to start the Redis process.

# Start Redis

$ sudo service redis-server start

##Before you do anything, you MUST read THIS.!!!

Before you stop the bot, if you don't want to loose your redis data, you have to perform a save.

There are three ways of doing this: use $stop command to stop the bot (database will be saved automatically), use $save command to save database (and then stop the bot), or open a terminal and run redis-cli bgsave or redis-cli save (and then stop the bot).

Please remember to do one of this easy things in order to avoid to loose important informations.

You may want to perform a save each minute, for this you need to change the boolean value of the cron function in plugins/admin.lua from false to cron (or the name of the cron function).

This way, a cron job will run every minute and will perform a redis background save.

##Start the process

To start the bot, run ./launch.sh. To stop the bot, press Control CTRL+C twice.

You may also start the bot with lua bot.lua, however it will not restart automatically.

##Something that you should known before run the bot

  • You can change some settings of the bot. All the settings are placed in config.lua, in the bot_settings table
    • cache_time.adminlist: the permanence in seconds of the adminlist in the cache. The bot caches the adminlist to avoid to hit Telegram limits
    • testing_mode: set it to false if you want the bot to ignore testing plugins. A plugin is a test plugin when the test key in the returned table is not a nil value or a false boolean value
    • multipurpose_mode: set it to true if you want to load the plugins placed in plugins/multipurpose folder. At the moment, this directory is empty
    • notify_bug: if true, the bot will send a message that notifies that a bug has occured to the current user, when a plugin is executed and an error happens
    • log_api_errors: if true, the bot will send in the log_chat (config.lua) all the relevant errors returned by an api request toward Telegram
    • stream_commands: if true, when an update triggers a plugin, the match will be printed on the console
  • There are some other useful fields that can be filled in config.lua
    • channel: a channel where you can post something through the bot. Must be an username, @ included. To post something, the bot must be administrator of the channel. Use $post [text] to post a message
    • db: the selected Redis database (if you are running Redis with the default config, the available databases are 16). The database will be selected on each start/reload. Default: 2
  • Other things that may be useful
    • Administrators commands start for $. They are not documented, look at the triggers of plugins/admin.lua plugin for the whole list
    • If the action function of a plugin returns true, the bot will continue to try to match the message text with the missing triggers of the plugins table
    • You can send yourself a backup of the zipped bot folder with the $backup command
    • The Telegram Bot API has some undocumented "weird behaviors" that you may notice while using this bot
      • In supergroups, the kickChatMember method returns always a positive response if the user_id has been part of the group at least once, it doesn't matter if the user is not in the group when you use this method
      • In supergroups, the unbanChatMember method returns always a positive response if the user_id has been part of the group at least once, it doesn't matter if the user is not in the group or is not in the group blacklist
      • Users kicked by the bot can join again a group from where they've been kicked out only if not banned and only via invite link. A administrator can't add them back

##Some notes about the database

Everything is stored on Redis, and the fastest way to edit your database is via the Redis CLI.

You can find a backup of your Redis database in /etc/redis/dump.rdb. The name of this file and the frequency of saves are dependent on your redis configuration file.

Translators

If you want to help translate the bot, follow the instructions below. Parts of Group Butler use tools from gettext. However we don't use binary format *.mo for the sake of simplicity. The bot manually parses the *.po files in the locales directory.

If you want to improve an existing translation, run this command in the root directoy with the bot: ./launch.sh update-locale <name> where <name> is two letters of your chosen locale. Further edit the file locales/<name>.po, make sure that the translation is done correctly and send us your translation.

We recommend Poedit as editor of *.po files. You must specify information about yourself in the settings; put your link to Telegram account in the field Email if you have it.

If you want to create new locale, run ./launch.sh create-locale <name>. This command create the file locales/<name>.po with untranslated strings. You can also use Poedit to translate the bot. List of avaible locales see in gettext manual. After add your new locale in the file config.lua.

###Notes about this repository

Note that this bot is not open source because I want everyone to be able to clone it and run its own copy. It's open source because everyone can take a look on how the bot works, see which data are stored, and decide if the bot is worth to be a group administrator. There are some installation instructions just because why not.

Please don't contact me via Telegram asking for help in the installation or about errors in your clone (I like to spam-report people). Contact me only if you find a bug or have a suggestion. I don't give any support in the installation or development of your own instance of the bot. Basically because I'm a stupid noob that only knows the basics of Lua scripting, and I don't like to spend my free time in front of a monitor. I try to keep the time I waste on this project to a minimum.

If you are going to open a pull request, keep in mind that I don't know how to use GitHub well. I may overwrite commits and stuffs like that, this already happened. It's not because I'm bad, it's just because I'm an idiot.

##Credits

Topkecleon, for the original otouto

Iman Daneshi and Tiago Danin, for Jack-telegram-bot

Yago Pérez for his telegram-bot

The Werewolf guys, for aiding the spread of the bot

Lucas Montuano, for helping me a lot in the debugging of the bot

All the people who reported bugs and suggested new stuffs

Le Laide