Telegram Bot for your Blog

This is a Telegram Bot, written in PHP, to send your followers the latest articles.

For an example, just follow @netzleben_bot. It's my bot for my personal blog netzleben.com [German].

If you have any questions, feel free to ask @schmidtflo.

Requirements

• Telegram Bot with API-Key
• Webserver
• Valid SSL-Cert (not self-signed!)
• MySQL (or other database running with PDO)
• cURL
• Memcached + PHP extension
• import.io-account

Installation

0. Create a bot

If you haven't done this so far, create a new bot for Telegram.

1. Uploading on Webspace

• Upload the bot.php to your Webspace.
• Install a valid SSL-cert.

2. Create database

• Create a new database.
• Create a table in it.
• Add a field 'user_id' to the database (unique!).

3. import.io-account

• create a new import with the homepage of your blog.
• note down the table field with the title and link in it.

4. Set webhook

You have to set a webhook for the Telegam-API. To do this, open the following line in a browser:

https://api.telegram.org/bot<your_api_key>/setWebhook?url=https://<url.to.website>/bot.php?sender=telegram

5. configure the bot

see below

6. set command at @botfather

You find all setting for @botfather here.

Sample command-settings:

start - Subscribe to the latest articles
stop - End the subscription
contact - How to contact me
help - Help

How to use

After installing, everything is running.

To send a new article to your followers:

https://<your.url.here>/bot.php?auth_key=<your_auth_key>&refresh=true

To send a custom message to all followers:

https://<your.url.here>/bot.php?auth_key=<your_auth_key>&message=Hello World!

Configuration

// Your Telegram-API-Key
$api_key = '<your api key>';

Insert the key you got from @botfather here.

// import.io Key
$import_io = '<import.io key>';

Insert the link you got to use import.io.

// The import.io fields for title and link
$import_io_title = '';
$import_io_link = '';

When you created the import.io-key, you got a big table with the content of your blog. Insert the fieldnames for the title of the latest article and the link to the latest article here.

// Your memcached-credentials
$memcached_host = '/home/user/memcached.socket';
$memcached_port = 0; // 0 if you use sockets, normally 11211 if you access it via port

Insert your memcached-credentials. Sockets and port are possible.

// Your database
$db_host = 'mysql:host=localhost;dbname=telegram_bot';
$db_table = 'bot';
$db_user = 'username';
$db_pw = 'password';

Database. Should be clear.

// Logging
$logging = true;

If you want to enable logging. If true, all requests are stored in log.txt, you also get a message if anyone subscribes.

// Your telegram user_id (you can get it with logging)
$my_user_id = 0123456789;

Insert your user_id here. You can get it with logging your own request.

// personal authentification key. Randomly created by you.
$auth_key = '<randomly generated key>';

Insert a randomly generated key here.

$start_text = "Thanks for subscribing!";
$stop_text = "Ok, you stopped the subscription.";
$contact_text = "You can contact me via Telegram: @schmidtflo";
$help_text = "Use /start or /stop";
$latest_article_text = "Latest article: ";
$new_article_text = "New article: ";

The messages your follower should get. /command and @user is automatically linked by telegram. To break the line, use \n

Sending photos or documents

When you want to send pictures, documents and so on, you have to change the code.

But sending is already implemented:

sendmessage('message_type', 'user_id', $filepath);

As an example, to send picture.png from the same folder to somebody:

sendmessage('photo', $message["message"]["from"]["id"], 'picture.png');

Credits

This bot is created by @schmidtflo.