TeleNotify

TeleNotify by ppati000 enables your Rails app to send notifications/messages to your users via Telegram's Bot API. Forget email newsletters!

A working demo can be tested here. For the source, see the TeleTest repository

Installation

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Prerequisites

Needless to say, you need a Telegram bot account first. To generate a new Telegram bot, message @botfather on Telegram. For more information, see the official guide. During this process, you will obtain a token which you will need in the following steps.

Your app must have HTTPS enabled.

Install

Just add the following to your Gemfile.

#Gemfile
gem 'tele_notify', '~> 0.1.1'

And follow that up with a bundle install.

Setup and Database Migrations

TeleNotify uses a telegram_users table to store all users. To generate and run the migration just use.

rails generate tele_notify:migration

This will also generate a config file in config/initializers/tele_notify.rb. Make sure to set your Telegram token and application URLs here. It should look something like this:

#Set your home URL, so Telegram callbacks work
#For production, just use your URL (e.g. https://myapp.com)
#You MUST NOT include a trailing slash and it MUST be https!
#INVALID URLS: e.g. http://myapp.com or https://myapp.com/
TeleNotify::TelegramUser.configure_home_url("YOUR PRODUCTION URL")

#For development, download ngrok from https://ngrok.com/.
#Extract it and run "./ngrok http 3000"
#Then copy the URL you get from the console window.
#Remember to use the HTTPS URL!
TeleNotify::TelegramUser.configure_dev_url("YOUR NGROK DEVELOPMENT URL")

#Set your Telegram Bot API token here
#Don't have your token yet? Create your bot using https://telegram.me/botfather
TeleNotify::TelegramUser.configure_token("YOUR TOKEN")

Set webhook, so bot will know where to send user data:

https://api.telegram.org/bot<TOKEN>/setWebHook?url=https://<EXAMPLE.COM>/<TOKEN>
{"ok":true,"result":true,"description":"Webhook was set"}

Next, add two lines of code to make your ApplicationController look like this:

#app/controllers/application_controller.rb
class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
  protect_from_forgery with: :exception

  #IMPORTANT! THESE TWO LINES MUST COME AFTER protect_from_forgery!
  skip_before_filter :verify_authenticity_token, :only => :webhook
  include TeleNotify::Controller

  #other code...
end

Last but not least, add a callback URL for Telegram in config/routes.rb, which must be the same as your token.

#config/routes.rb
Rails.application.routes.draw do
  post '/<your token>' => 'application#webhook'
end

Now that everything is done, you can finally run bundle exec rake db:migrate and restart server. Congratulations! You successfully installed TeleNotify!

Using TeleNotify

To give users the ability to sign up for your Telegram Notifications, put a link to your telegram bot somewhere in your app. This can be as simple as

<a href="https://telegram.me/YOUR_BOT_USERNAME">Send us a message to receive Push Notifications via Telegram!"</a>

Any user that sends a message to your bot will be stored in the database with their telegram_id and their first_name.

Send messages to those users like this: (e.g. from some controller in your app)

#in some controller action

#sends message to a user
TeleNotify::TelegramUser.find(1).send_message("How Obama won the internet: Read more at http://example.com")

#finds a user by his Telegram ID and sends him a message
TeleNotify::TelegramUser.find_by(telegram_id: 12345678).send_message("Some other notification")

#sends a message to everyone who signed up
TeleNotify::TelegramUser.send_message_to_all("Check out our new stuff!")

Testing

All testing is currently here: TeleTest repository

Changes

0.1.1

• Initial release

Contributing

Fork it. Commit your changes. Make a pull request :)

License

TeleNotify was initially forked from Acts as votable by ryanto. It is released under the MIT License.