Integrating Telegram Bots with Rails

Chris Downey cdowney@protonmail.com

Please install Telegram on your phone or laptop for hands-on experience during the presentation

https://telegram.org/

it will also be more interesting when we get into managing subscriptions

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Create a DCRug Telegram bot

Bots are third-party apps that run inside Telegram.

Our Rails app controls the bot, providing the content, managing

subscribers, interactions, and broadcasts.

Our bot will send DCRug event listings

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Create a DCRug Telegram bot Start by using a bot to create your bot

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Now that DCRug bot is created,how do we communicate with it?

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With bots, we can have 2 types of communication:

1. Subscriber initiated2. Bot (Rails app) initiated

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Subscriber initiated communication

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Bot (Rails app) initiated communication

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Capture real-time Telegram bot events

Just for fun: first article on web hooks (may have coined term): http://progrium.com/blog/2007/05/03/web-hooks-to-revolutionize-the-web/

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We will setup DCRug bot with a webhook, and use ngrok to create a secure tunnel to my dev machine

and to inspect the webhook payload

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Setup dev machine to accept webhooks from Telegram with ngrok

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If you have Telegram installed, please subscribe

Via browser: http://telegram.me/DCRug_bot

Via Telegram: go into “Chats” and search for DCRug

(please call out if this isn’t working for you)

secret command /count provides number of subscribers

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What just happened?

Our bot (Rails app!):

• intercepted a webhook • extracted the bot command • created a subscriber in the database • sent a response to the new subscriber

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Intercept a webhook

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Extract bot command from webhook payload

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Create a subscriber in the database

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Send response to the new subscriber

use telegram-bot-ruby gem to wrap and simplify Telegram API

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Pop Quiz!

how can we broadcast DCRug events, right now, to all active subscribers?

Broadcast DCRug events to all subscribers

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The End

Questions, comments, thoughts?

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(See me after the meeting for an example of another very different bot if interested, it enables searches across 2 websites and a database of tweets going back 6 years)

A bot serving a small educational non-profit

https://telegram.me/VaxCalc_bot

Searches a database of more than 1,100 “foundational knowledge” tweets produced since 2010

Combines results with custom Google search of 2 content-heavy websites with articles going back 30 years

good search: allergy

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(to be fixed) Subscribers receive 4:10 pm notification of “trending” tweet past 24 hours