Personal Bot

Note

This is more of a PoC project, a code review & revise is suggested before using it in production.

A simple Telegram bot hosted on Cloudflare Workers, which can perform:

Cron job fetching posts from Twitter, if new posts with images are found, it will send them to user
...

GitHub Actions is used for CI/CD, meaning that the bot will be automatically deployed to Cloudflare Workers when new commits are pushed to the main branch.

Deployment

Warning

Hide any sensitive information before pushing to GitHub / asking for help.

To host you own version of this bot, you need to:

Register a new bot on Telegram and get the API token (contact BotFather on Telegram)
A Cloudflare account with Workers enabled

You'll also need to create a KV namespace in Cloudflare Workers, follow CF Guide here:

npx wrangler kv namespace create "DATA"

and change wrangler.toml to your own:

[[kv_namespaces]]
binding = "DATA"
id = "c687973e88a54653908e2d016fb6ac8a"

Then set envs/secrets, follow these steps:

Set CLOUDFLARE_API_TOKEN

Follow CF Guide here, you'll need Workers KV Storage:Edit, Workers Scripts:Edit permissions.

This env is only used for CI/CD, so you can set it in GitHub Secrets.

You may now create a first deployment, but currently no connection to telegram is established, so the bot won't work.
Set ENV_BOT_TOKEN

The API token you got from BotFather.

This would be used both in debugging & production runtime, first create a .dev.vars file in the root of the project:
```
echo "
ENV_BOT_TOKEN=YOUR_BOT_TOKEN
" > .dev.vars
```
.dev.vars are ignored by git for safety, but you'll still need to set them to CF worker for them to be available in production runtime:
```
npx wrangler secret put ENV_BOT_TOKEN
```
Set ENV_BOT_SECRET

This is to prevent /webhook endpoint from unauthorized access other than telegram, first generate a random string:
```
openssl rand -base64 32
```
Then set it in .dev.vars:
```
echo "
ENV_BOT_SECRET=YOUR_SECRET
" >> .dev.vars
```
like ENV_BOT_TOKEN, set it to CF worker:
```
npx wrangler secret put ENV_BOT_SECRET
```
Note an extra step is required for the worker to bind telegram webhook to itself, you'll need to manually call /setWebhook endpoint just once after deployment:
```
curl -D - "https://your-worker-name.your-username.workers.dev/setWebhook?secret=YOUR_SECRET"
```
set ENV_BOT_ADMIN_CHAT_ID

First open Worker Logs in CF dashboard, then send a message to your bot, you'll see the chat id in the logs.

Set it in .dev.vars:
```
echo "
ENV_BOT_ADMIN_CHAT_ID=YOUR_CHAT_ID
" >> .dev.vars
```
like ENV_BOT_TOKEN, set it to
```
npx wrangler secret put ENV_BOT_ADMIN_CHAT_ID
```

Twitter features

For convenience, these variables are stored in KV storage other than env variables/secrets to allow fast rotation/update:

twitter_cookies
twitter_users

To update them, you can send /set commands to the bot, for example:

/set twitter_cookies YOUR_COOKIES

Development

Unlike other bot runtimes, this webhook method to receive updates from telegram is more like a serverless function, so debugging locally might not be as straightforward.

However with the framework set up properly, you'll easily write code w/o much errors, just git commit --amend and git push -f and wait for CI/CD to publish edits.

Note

CF Worker KV have a limit of 1000 writes per day on a free plan, lower cron job frequency in wrangler.toml if you're close to the limit.

tiankaima/personal-bot

Personal Bot

Deployment

Twitter features

Development