Absolute - Discord & Telegram Bridge "DisTel"

DisTel is a bot which bridges a chat in Telegram with a channel in Discord.

There is no public DisTels bot. You need to host it yourself. To host a bot, you need nodejs. The bot requires NodeJS 8 or higher

TediCross News Channel

We now have a Telegram channel where we post news about the bot! Join us at https://t.me/TediCross

Features & known bugs

The bot is able to relay text messages and media files between Discord and Telegram. @-mentions, URLs, code (both inline and block-style) works well

For a list of known bugs, or to submit a bug or feature request, see this repo's "Issues" tab

Step by step installation:

Setting up the bot requires basic knowledge of the command line, which is bash or similar on Linux/Mac, and cmd.exe in Windows

1. Install nodejs
2. Clone this git repo, or download it as a zip or whatever
3. Open a terminal and enter the repo with the cd command. Something like cd Downloads/dtbridge-master. Your exact command may differ
4. Run the command npm install --production
5. Make a copy of the file example.settings.yaml and name it settings.yaml
6. Aquire a bot token for Telegram (How to create a Telegram bot) and put it in the settings file

• The Telegram bot must be able to access all messages. Talk to @BotFather to disable privacy mode for the bot
• Do NOT use another bot you already have running. That will cause all sorts of weird problems. Make a new one

7. Aquire a bot token for Discord (How to create a Discord bot) and put it in the settings file under discord.token. NOTE that the token is NOT the "Client Secret". The token is under the section "App bot user" further down the page

• Do NOT use another bot you already have running. That will cause all sorts of weird problems. Make a new one

8. Add the Telegram bot to the Telegram chat

• If the Telegram chat is a supergroup, the bot also needs to be admin of the group, or it won't get the messages. The creator of the supergroup is able to give it admin rights

9. Add the Discord bot to the Discord server (https://discordapp.com/oauth2/authorize?client_id=YOUR_CLIENT_ID_HERE&scope=bot&permissions=248832). This requires that you have admin rights on the server
10. Start DisTel: npm start
11. Ask the bots for the remaining details. In the Telegram chat and the Discord channel, write /chatinfo. Put the info you get in the settings file.

• If you want to bridge a Telegram group or channel, remember that the ID is negative. Include the - when entering it into the settings file
• It is important that the Discord channel ID is wrapped with single quotes when entered into the settings file. '244791815503347712', not 244791815503347712

12. Restart DisTel. You stop it by pressing CTRL + C in the terminal it is running in

Done! You now have a nice bridge between a Telegram chat and a Discord channel

Settings

As mentioned in the step by step installation guide, there is a settings file. Here is a description of what the settings do.

• telegram: Object authorizing and defining the Telegram bot's behaviour
  • token: The Telegram bot's token. It is needed for the bot to authenticate to the Telegram servers and be able to send and receive messages. If set to "env", DisTel will read the token from the environment variable TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN
  • useFirstNameInsteadOfUsername: EXPERIMENTAL If set to false, the messages sent to Discord will be tagged with the sender's username. If set to true, the messages sent to Discord will be tagged with the sender's first name (or nickname). Note that Discord users can't @-mention Telegram users by their first name. Defaults to false
  • colonAfterSenderName: Whether or not to put a colon after the name of the sender in messages from Discord to Telegram. If true, the name is displayed Name:. If false, it is displayed Name. Defaults to false
  • skipOldMessages: Whether or not to skip through all previous messages cached from the telegram-side and start processing new messages ONLY. Defaults to true. Note that there is no guarantee the old messages will arrive at Discord in order
  • sendEmojiWithStickers: Whether or not to send the corresponding emoji when relaying stickers to Discord
• discord: Object authorizing and defining the Discord bot's behaviour
  • token: The Discord bot's token. It is needed for the bot to authenticate to the Discord servers and be able to send and receive messages. If set to "env", DisTel will read the token from the environment variable DISCORD_BOT_TOKEN
  • skipOldMessages: Whether or not to skip through all previous messages sent since the bot was last turned off and start processing new messages ONLY. Defaults to true. Note that there is no guarantee the old messages will arrive at Telegram in order. NOTE: Telegram has a limit on how quickly a bot can send messages. If there is a big backlog, this will cause problems
  • useNickname: Uses the sending user's nickname instead of username when relaying messages to Telegram
  • replyLength: How many characters of the original message to display on replies
  • maxReplyLines: How many lines of the original message to display on replies
• debug: If set to true, activates debugging output from the bot. Defaults to false
• bridges: An array containing all your chats and channels. For each object in this array, you should have the following properties:
  • name: A internal name of the chat. Appears in the log
  • direction: Direction of the bridge. "both" for bidirectional, "d2t" for discord-to-telegram, "t2d" for telegram-to-discord
  • telegram.chatId: ID of the chat that is the Telegram end of this bridge. See step 11 on how to aquire it
  • telegram.relayJoinMessages: Whether or not to relay messages to Discord about people joining the Telegram chat
  • telegram.relayLeaveMessages: Whether or not to relay messages to Discord about people leaving the Telegram chat
  • telegram.sendUsernames: Whether or not to send the sender's name with the messages to Discord
  • telegram.relayCommands: If set to false, messages starting with a / are not relayed to Discord
  • telegram.crossDeleteOnTelegram: Whether or not to also delete the corresponding message on Discord when one is deleted on Telegram. NOTE: See FAQ about deleting messages.
  • discord.channelId: ID of the channel the Discord end of the bridge is in. See step 11 on how to aquire it
  • discord.relayJoinMessages: Whether or not to relay messages to Telegram about people joining the Discord chat
  • discord.relayLeaveMessages: Whether or not to relay messages to Telegram about people leaving the Discord chat
  • discord.sendUsernames: Whether or not to send the sender's name with the messages to Telegram
  • discord.crossDeleteOnTelegram: Whether or not to also delete the corresponding message on Telegram when one is deleted in Discord

The available settings will occasionally change. The bot takes care of this automatically

FAQ

What kind of machine do I need to run this?

Anything capable of running NodeJS should be able to run DisTel. People have had success running it on ordinary laptops, raspberry pis, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and other machines. It runs on both Linux and Windows, and probably also macOS. It does NOT, however, run on Heroku

The machine must be on for DisTel to work

Just how much knowledge of the command line do I need to get the bot working?

Not much at all. Almost all the commands are written in the installation guide exactly as they should be entered. The only thing you need to know in addition is the cd command, in order to navigate to wherever you unpacked DisTel

The bot gives an error with the message node: not found when I try to run it

This likely means you are using Ubuntu or another Debian based Linux distro. You get node version 4 when you do apt-get install nodejs, and it is called nodejs instead of node.

DisTel requires node 14.9 or higher to run. To get node 14 on a debian based system (including Ubuntu), run the following two commands:

curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_8.x | sudo -E bash -
sudo apt-get install -y nodejs

Then try to run the bot again

The bot just responds with a generic message telling me to get my own DisTel instance

This happens when you have not entered correct chat IDs in the settings file. See step 11 in the step by step installation guide for instructions on how to get these.

A small gotcha here is that Telegram group chats always have a negative chat ID. Remember to include the "-" in the settings file!

The Telegram bot doesn't relay messages sent by other bots

The Telegram team unfortunately decided that bots cannot interact with each other, fearing they would get stuck in infinite loops. This means it is impossible, under any circumstances, for DisTel to relay messages from other Telegram bots to Discord. Discord does not have this limitation, and the Discord side of the bot will happily relay messages from other Discord bots to Telegram

See https://core.telegram.org/bots/faq#why-doesn-39t-my-bot-see-messages-from-other-bots

Deleting a message in Telegram does not delete it in Discord

Telegram bots are unfortunately completely unable to detect when a message is deleted. There is no way to implement T2D cross-deletion until Telegram implements this. NOTE: A partial solution to this has been implemented. When a message on Telegram is edited to become just a single dot (.), DisTel will delete it both on Telegram and on Discord.

Deleting messages D2T works as expected

When running npm install, it complains about missing dependencies?

The Discord library DisTel is using has support for audio channels and voice chat. For this, it needs some additional libraries, like node-opus, libsodium and others. DisTel does not do audio, so these warnings can safely be ignored

How do I create more bridges?

DisTel supports a theoretically infinite number of bridges, limited only by your hardware. Even a simple Raspberry Pi is powerful enough to run multiple bridges, so don't worry about making more

To make more bridges, just copy the one you have, paste it right below and make necessary changes:

...
bridges:
  - name: Default bridge
    direction: both
    telegram:
      ...
    discord:
      ...
  - name: Another bridge
    direction: both
    telegram:
      ...
    discord:
      ...
...

The names of the bridges are practically only log identifiers. They can be whatever string you want them to be. Note, however, that the setting discord.skipOldMessages uses the names to know which messages was last sent from which channel, so they should be unique.

Note that the settings file is indentation sensitive. If you do for example

  - name: Bridge 1
      direction: both

it won't work. The "d" in "direction" must be directly below the "n" in "name". See example.settings.yaml for proper indentation

DisTel spams errors in the console saying "terminated by other long poll or web hook"

This happens when two applications use the same Telegram bot token, or someone has set a webhook on the Telegram bot token. You may simply have accidently launched two instances of DisTel, or someone else has somehow gotten hold of your token

If you haven't accidently launched two instances of DisTel, assume the token is compromised. First, talk to @BotFather to generate a new token for the bot. Then go to https://api.telegram.org/botTOKEN/deleteWebhook (with TOKEN replaced with your actual token) to get rid of any webhook set for the bot. Then update the settings file, and restart the bot

How do I make the bot run automatically when my computer/server starts?

Take a look in guides/autostart/ of this repo