Telegram bot as a tool to keep track of your expenses.
These instructions will get you a copy of the project up and running on your local machine for development and testing purposes. See deployment for notes on how to deploy the project on a live system.
Once you have your server setup, just start a chat with your bot using the Telegram client.
For a description of available commands, use the /help command.
In order to test or deploy this project, first you have to talk to Bot Father to create your own bots. More details here.
I strongly recommend to create two bots: one for testing, to be used in your dev environment and another one for production, used in the deployment.
First, you need to create a testing Telegram Bot.
Once you have your testing bot, you need to create a file in bot/secret_token.py with the
following content (replacing {BOT_TOKEN} with the token of your testing bot)
TESTING_BOT_TOKEN = '{BOT_TOKEN}'
Next, you have to create a new virtual environment, install the requirements, run the migrations and start the dev bot:
python3 -m venv env
source env/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
python manage.py migrate
python manage.py startbot
Now you can talk to your bot in telegram! Send your bot /help to see the available commands.
If you want to watch the expenses you have load, or any other information saved by your bot, you need to create a super user:
python manage.py createsuperuser
Follow the prompt steps and create a user, then run the web locally:
python manage.py runserver
From your browser, go to http://localhost:8000/admin enter your username and password (created in the previous step) and now you can explore the data that your bot has generated!
You can easily deploy this project on Heroku:
You will need to set the environment variable BOT_TOKEN to a valid Telegram Bot authorization
token. This implies creating your own Telegram bot.
- Sofía Denner
TBD