mPACT

A Telegram-based expert support system

Telegram configuration

The following steps are required to create a bot for use in any project:

Download Telegram to your phone and set it up.
Follow instructions for obtaining your Telegram API key. Note your API ID and the API hash.
Create a bot by messaging the botfather. Note your bot's username and token.
Optional: Disable privacy mode for your bot to ensure that it can see all messages. If you do not wish to disable privacy mode, ensure that the bot is added as an admin to each group. If it was added as a non-admin, you will need to re-add the bot.

Development Quickstart with Docker

Install docker and docker-compose.

1. Set Environment Variables

cp .env.dev.example .env.dev

Fill in the appropriate values as needed.

2. Perform first-time setup and start services

make init

Enter user details to create your first superuser, and you're done!

Open localhost:8000 in a browser and skip to "Creating a new chat group".

Note, that for subsequent runs, you can just run

make start

docker-compose up

Additionally, if you need to restart processes (edits are not automatically picked up by celery and the bot) you can run:

make start

More details on available commands can be found by running:

make

Deployment

Demo / Test environment

A demo environment has been stood up on Heroku using Heroku's container support. The environment can be found at http://mpact-demo.herokuapp.com/

Configuration for the environment can be found in the heroku.yml file in repository root. The application uses Docker containers built from the Dockerfile.heroku file in the repository root.

The heroku.yml file can also be used to deploy new environments. The instructions are:

Install the heroku command line tool and connect it to your account.
Create a new heroku application.
Run heroku stack:set container
Configure your project environment variables. This can be done in the "Settings" tab in the heroku dashboard, or via the CLI by running heroku config:set <var>=<value>. Most of the variables used in development are also required for production, including BOT_TOKEN, BOT_USERNAME, TELEGRAM_API_HASH, TELEGRAM_API_ID, and SECRET_KEY. Additionally DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE should be set to telegram_bot.settings_heroku.
Deploy - either by using heroku's git support or connecting it directly to the git repository.
Create DB and superuser: heroku run python manage.py migrate, heroku run python manage.py createsuperuser

The current demo site is configured to automatically update with every commit to the main branch on github.

mPACT Administration

See the Admin documentation for more information on how to administrate your deployed mPACT instance.

dimagi/mpact