Telegram bot for "Помощь украинцам в Германии" wiki

The current bot name is dv-wiki-bot. DV stands for "Digital Volunteers".

The Notion wiki is here.

The Java library TelegramBots is used as the Telegram API wrapper.

The useful "Getting Started" for this library — https://github.com/rubenlagus/TelegramBots/wiki/Getting-Started.

To enable bot to answer ALL the messages (not only the ones starting with /), you have to disable its privacy, using the /setprivacy command in the @BotFather. After changing the privacy setting, you may need to remove and add the bot to the chat.

To change the bot username in Telegram, use the /setname command in the @BotFather.

To change the bot avatar in Telegram, use the /setuserpic command in the @BotFather.

The bot runs as a simple Java Main class.

Run the bot from the jar with dependencies

Set the environment variable WIKI_BOT_CONFIG_FILE_PATH:

export WIKI_BOT_CONFIG_FILE_PATH=/path/to/your/file/wiki-bot-config.json

In the json config, set environmentName property to indicate the environment:

  "environmentName": "My local super environment",

and botToken for your bot instance (test, prod, etc)

  "botToken": "1234567890:AAFxrf7...",

Execute the java Main class from the jar file. You can override the log4j configuration via the log4j.configurationFile property.

java -Dlog4j.configurationFile=./log4j2-override.xml -jar wiki-telegram-bot-1.0-SNAPSHOT-jar-with-dependencies.jar

Run bot on AWS EC2 instance

Install java 17 on AWS EC instance

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/corretto/latest/corretto-17-ug/amazon-linux-install.html

Connect to EC2 via Putty

https://asf.alaska.edu/how-to/data-recipes/connect-to-your-ec2-instance-using-putty-v1-1/

And then login under ec2-user.

Run the bot in a screen session

See https://linuxize.com/post/how-to-use-linux-screen/

We have to run the java process of the bot in a separate screen session to not drop it after we disconnected from PuTTY.

Copy bot files to the EC2 instance using the copy-to-ec2.sh file.

Log in to the EC2 instance using PuTTY, username ec2-user.

Go to the bot directory

cd /home/ec2-user/wiki-bot

Create a screen session for the bot:

screen -S wiki-bot

Make sure you've set up the environment variable:

export WIKI_BOT_CONFIG_FILE_PATH="/home/ec2-user/wiki-bot/wiki-bot-config.json"

Run the bot using the run-ec2.sh script

source ./run-ec2.sh

Disconnect from the current screen session: Ctrl + A, D.

You can watch the logs of the bot:

tail -f ./wiki-bot.log

Now you can disconnect from PuTTY and the bot will continue to work!

To stop the bot, connect to PuTTY again.

Get back to the screen session:

screen -r wiki-bot

And press Ctrl + C to stop the bot.

How to add a new bot instance

• Define the bot name and whether the bot should be male/female.
• Define the bot default settings.
• Create the new bot, /newbot in the @BotFather.
• Set bot name via /setname in the @BotFather.
• Disable bot privacy using /setprivacy in the @BotFather.
• Set male or female bot avatar via /setuserpicin the @BotFather.
• Add bot config to the prod json config file.
• Build the maven artifact mvn install.
• Connect to EC2 via PuTTY.
• Resume the screen session running the bot.
• Stop the running bot instances with Ctrl + C.
• Deploy the new bot configuration with copy-to-ec2.sh.
• Start bot instances with run-ec2.sh.