Telepush

Send Telegram push notifications easily via HTTP

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📄 Description

A simple Telegram Bot to translate POST requests with JSON payload into Telegram push messages. Similar Gotify and ntfy.sh, except without an extra app. Useful for server monitoring, alerting, and anything else.

⌨️ How to use?

Step 1: Get a token

Open Telegram, start a chat with the TelepushBot (or your own bot, respectively) and type /start to obtain a recipient token.

Step 2: Send messages

Messages are sent via POST to https://telepush.dev/api/[[inlets/<inlet_name>]|messages]/<recipient>.

RECIPIENT_TONEN=... # The token you received using /start.
curl -XPOST \
     -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
     -d '{ "text": "*Hello World!* (yes, this is Markdown)" }' \
     "https://telepush.dev/api/messages/${RECIPIENT_TONEN}"

When hosting your own instance, replace the URL respectively.

✉️ Message options

Key	Type	Description
text*	string	Actual message in plain text or Markdown format
origin	string	What will be shown as the sender of your message
type	[TEXT, FILE]	Message type, i.e. to send text or a file (default: TEXT)
file**	base64	Base64-encoded file content
filename**	string	Name of the file to send
options	object	Additional options to pass
options.disable_link_previews	bool	Whether to show previews of links in the chat

* = required for type: TEXT, ** = required for type: FILE

More details to be found here.

🏃‍♀️ How to run?

☁️ Option 1: telepush.dev

Simply use the official hosted instance. Rate-limited to 240 requests per recipient per day.

🌐 Option 2: Self-hosted

When hosting your own Telepush instance, you need to create a new bot with @BotFather first. As a result, you will get a token that you then pass to Telepush when starting the server (see below).

🐳 Option 2.1: With Docker

$ docker volume create telepush_data
$ docker run -d \
    -p 8080:8080 \
    -v telepush_data:/srv/data \
    --name telepush \
    ghcr.io/muety/telepush \
    -mode webhook \
    -token <YOUR_BOTFATHER_TOKEN>

🐋 Option 2.2: With Kubernetes

See here.

🛠 Option 2.3: Compile from source

# Install
$ go install github.com/muety/telepush@latest

# Run (webhook mode)
$ ./telepush -token <YOUR_BOTFATHER_TOKEN> -mode webhook

↔️ Webhook vs. long-polling

You can either run the bot in long-polling- or webhook mode (-mode [webhook|poll]). For production use the latter option is recommended for various reasons. However, you'll need a server with a static IP and a TLS certificate.

More details about webhook setup can be found in Marvin's Marvellous Guide to All Things Webhook.

🔓 HTTPS

In webhook mode, Telegram requires your updates endpoint to use HTTPS. To enable such, either run Telepush behind a reverse proxy (like Caddy), that terminates TLS.

Or, let Telepush itself handle TLS. You'll need a certificate for this, so either get one from Let's Encrypt or create a self-signed one, then use -useHttps in combination with -certPath and -keyPath pointed to your certificate and private key files respectively.

For self-signed certificates, you'll need to pass your public key to Telegram's setWebhook method in addition, see these instructions.

🔧 Configuration options

• -address (string) – Network address (IPv4) to bind to. Defaults to 127.0.0.1.
• -address6 (string) – Network address (IPv6) to bind to. Defaults to ::1.
• -disableIPv6 (bool) – Whether to disable listening on both IPv4 and IPv6 interfaces. Defaults to false.
• -port (int) – TCP port to listen on. Defaults to 8080.
• -proxy (string) – Proxy connection string to be used for long-polling mode. Defaults to none.
• -urlSecret (string) – Random suffix to append to your updates route called by Telegram's servers to prevent spam. Defaults to none.
• -useHttps (bool) – Whether to use HTTPS. Defaults to false.
• -certPath (string) – Path of your SSL certificate when using webhook mode with useHttp. Default to none.
• -keyPath (string) – Path of your private SSL key when using webhook mode with useHttp. Default to none.
• -dataDir (string) – File system location where to store persistent data. Defaults to ..
• -inlets (string) – Path to folder containing config-based inlet definitions in YAML format. Defaults to ./inlets.d.
• -blacklist (string) – Path to a line-separated blacklist file containing user IDs (send /help to get your id). Defaults to blacklist.txt.
• -whitelist (string) – Path to a line-separated whitelist file containing user IDs (send /help to get your id). Defaults to whitelist.txt.
• -rateLimit (int) – Maximum number of messages to be delivered to each recipient per hour. Defaults to 100.
• -truncateMsgs (bool) – Truncate too long messages to 4096 characters instead of rejecting them. Defaults to false.
• -metrics (bool) – Whether to expose Prometheus metrics under /metrics. Defaults to false.

When using the Docker image, you can alternatively set most of the above config options via environment variables (passed to docker run using -e), e.g. APP_USE_HTTPS=true, APP_CERT_PATH=/etc/telepush.crt, etc. For details, see entrypoint.sh.

Whitelist vs. Blacklist

(aka. allow-list vs. block-list)

📥 Inlets

Inlets provide a mechanism to pre-process incoming data that comes in a format different from what is normally expected by the bot.

This is especially useful if data is sent by external, third-party applications which you cannot modify.

For instance, you might want to deliver alerts from Prometheus' Alertmanager as Telegram notifications. However, Alertmanager's webhook requests look much different from Telepush's default input format. To still make them fit, you can write an Inlet to massage the data accordingly.

To directly address an inlet, request https://telepush.dev/api/inlets/<inlet_name>. Note that /api/inlets/default is equivalent to /api/messages.

Following inlets are currently available:

Name	Description	Status
default	Simply passes the request through without any changes	✅
alertmanager	Consumes Alertmanager webhook requests	✅
grafana	Consumes Grafana webhook requests	✅
webmentionio	Accepts Webmention.io webhook requests to notify about a new Webmention of one of your articles	✅
stripe	Accepts Stripe webhooks to notify about subscription status changes	✅
bitbucket	Accepts Bitbucket webhook requests to notify about a pipeline status change	⏳

You can also define your own, custom inlets in YAML. Further documentation on this and about the individual pre-existing inlets is available here.

For all inlets, the following options are available to be passed as query parameters:

Parameter	Description
disable_link_previews	Disable a preview version of web links detected in the message. Default: false.
disable_markdown	Disable the message being attempted to be parsed as Markdown. Default: false.

Example: POST https://telepush.dev/api/inlets/default?disable_markdown=true&disable_link_previews=true.

📊 Metrics

Fundamental Prometheus metrics are exposed under /metrics, if the -metrics flag gets passed. They include:

• telepush_messages_total{origin="string", type="string"}
• telepush_requests_total{success="string"}

🐞 Troubleshooting

Error: panic: template: pattern matches no files: *.tpl.html

When running Telepush as a single executable, you must not use dev mode unless Telepush's source code is located inside the same directory. Make sure to not pass -env dev in this case.

📓 License

MIT @ Ferdinand Mütsch