arffsaad / confessionbot

Laravel-Redis-Telegram Confession Bot. Receives "confessions" from Laravel, queues in Redis, and posts to Telegram.

confessionBot

Laravel-Redis-Telegram Confession Bot. Receives "confessions" from Laravel, queues in Redis, and posts to Telegram.

What is it?

Automated Confession poster for Telegram. Anonymous users can send their rants through the webpage, and it is queued. Every 5 minutes, 5 messages from the queue will be sent to the configured channel. Queueing is done in Redis, while frontend/backend is in Laravel. The API is yet to be utilized, but its in planning.

Pre-requisites

• PHP8.0 or later
• Redis (any ver i guess)
• Composer
• Nodejs 14 & NPM
• Telegram Bot Token (Get it from Botfather)

Setting it up

1. Clone the repository.

   • For hosting purposes, copy ConfessWebnAPI to /var/www/html/

2. Initialize App

   • copy .env.example to .env
   • edit the parameters if needed, usually APP_URL and APP_ENV
   • run the following commands

   composer update
   composer install
   npm install
   npm run build               # Install packages
   php artisan key:generate
   php artisan migrate:fresh   # yes if prompted to create database
   php artisan db:seed         # creates a default user with an API Token
   

3. Setup Telegram Channel

   • Create a new (or use existing) channel on Telegram.
   • Enable discussions on the channel.
   • Invite the bot as an Admin in the Channel.
   • Retrieve the channelID by sending a request to https://api.telegram.org/bot{botToken}/getUpdates

4. Connect Telegram Bot to backend

   • Ensure redis is running.
   • use php artisan serve OR properly host a webserver using nginx
   • open the root webpage, and use the webconfigurator to test connection for the Bot.
   
   • API Token has no use yet. Ignore and finish setup.

5. Turn on Laravel Scheduler

   • Edit cron using crontab -e
   • add a new entry as follows

   * * * * * /path/to/php path/to/phpartisan schedule:run 1>> /dev/null 2>&1
   
   # example
   * * * * * /usr/bin/php /var/www/html/ConfessWebnAPI/artisan schedule:run >> /dev/null 2>&1
   

   • press ESC and :wq to exit out of vi

Dockers? we got you.

1. Ensure docker is installed
2. run docker run -d -p 80:80 ghcr.io/arffsaad/confessionbot:main
3. Go to http://localhost
4. Perform steps 3 & 4 as stated in normal setup. Step 5 is omitted since scheduler is automatically enabled.

For hosting purposes, use a reverse proxy such as nginx

Proper Usage

- Users will be invited to the channel, Admins are set properly in the channel as well.
- Admins will be invited to the discussion group.
- Users submit confession through web interface
- 5 Confessions are sent every 5 minutes.