/telegram-to-dynalist

Primary LanguageTypeScript

Telegram to Dynalist

Telegram is the app I use the most on my phone. Dynalist is my organisational succor on my desktop. I need an effective and simple way to manage one from the other (the dynalist android app is unfortunately just a little too much) and so this project was born.

Local development

  1. Clone the repo and navigate into it on your terminal
  2. Create a single postgres table with two columns telegram_id and dynalist_id
  3. Populate the .env file with your developer keys and postgres credentials
  4. Compile the code and start the server npm tsc --watch
  5. In a new terminal tab, start nodemon so you can actively develop
  6. In a third terminal tab, start the ngrok server ngrok http 3000
  7. Set the webhook of the bot to ngrok by running curl -F "url=https://<your-ngrok-url>/webhook" https://api.telegram.org/bot<your-telegram-bot-token>/setWebhook
  8. Magic! You should now be able to send messages to the bot and see them in dynalist. You can also see the logs of the server on the nodemon tab, the requests sent to your server in the ngrok tab, and details about the request body and response in the ngrok url in your browser.

Stack

  1. express.js (it works!)
  2. postgresql as database
  3. railway.app for hosting

Goal

To build a tool that adds a message from a specific telegram channel as a bullet point in my dynalist inbox. This will allow me to assign tasks to myself from telegram and I can use dynalist as the "get things done" store. But this will be an acceptable substitute on days I can't get to my laptop.

Roadmap

  • responding to the messages the bot sends you (via /showAllTasks) should also be edited, marked as done, etc
  • Onboarding flow that allows anyone to use the bot using their own dynalist API key
  • find the file ID of their inbox automatically
  • write a script to copy over a subset of the database from server to local
  • Change the database to include chat_id (user details) so that the bot can respond to multiple users
  • An inline keyboard on the telegram bot so that new users can find all the available commands
  • implement /showAllTasks
  • Handle edited messages from telegram correctly
    • Editing a message currently adds a new item to the list with the edited message
    • Editing a message on telegram should retrieve the previous item from dynalist and replace it with the new item
  • implement /edit (can't do this using edited messages feature because no way to get the original message without implementing a database)
  • implement /done
  • Bot should use message reactions instead of responding to the message
  • if a message is sent without any /commands then it is assumed to be /add