note-pls

Telegram bot that takes notes

   

What is this? | Usage | Installation | Development | Build from source

What is this?

note-pls is a small self-hosted Telegram bot that takes notes for you. Whenever you send it a message, it appends the text to the bottom of a file. Configured with a chat ID it will only accept messages from your account.

Usage

• Add the bot on Telegram
• Configure and run bot on your server
• Send a Telegram message to the bot: the bot will append the text to the end of the configured file
• Type the /inbox command: the bot will send the current content of the configured file

Installation

The bot is a command-line interface (CLI). It takes its configuration either as flags (note-pls -t <ADD ME>) or as ENV variables (NP_TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN=<ADD ME> note-pls).

Mandatory options are

• -t, --token, NP_TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN
• -c, --chat, NP_TELEGRAM_CHAT_ID

Use the -h, --help flag for help and to see all available configuration options or take a look at the provided example.env file.

Token and chat ID

Firstly, create a Telegram bot and obtain a token: Telegram docs.

After messaging the bot for the first time, you will be able to obtain your personal chat ID with the bot (method of obtaining it depends on device and preference). This will be used to make sure you and only you are able to message the bot.

Docker

The easiest way of running the bot is with Docker. Don't forget to map a volume to persist the file written by the bot.

docker run \
    -e NP_TELEGRAM_CHAT_ID=<ADD ME> \
    -e NP_TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN=<ADD ME> \
    -v /home/user/notes/inbox.txt:/inbox.txt
    ghcr.io/fjelloverflow/note-pls:latest

There are also an example docker-compose.yaml and example.env file provided.

Executable

You can also run the bot as an executable. Grab the latest executable for your platform on the releases page and simply run the CLI.

# download binary for Linux
wget -O note-pls https://github.com/FjellOverflow/note-pls/releases/download/v0.0.1/note-pls.v0.0.1.linux-x64

# make executable
chmod +x note-pls

# run binary
note-pls -t <ADD ME> -c <ADD ME>

Development

The project runs with bun, a NodeJS compatible JavaScript environment.

git clone https://github.com/FjellOverflow/note-pls.git
cd note-pls
bun install

To start the dev-server run bun run dev. For a full list of all commands, check the scripts section in package.json.

To install the recommended extensions for VSCode, open the Extensions tab and type @recommended.

Build from source

To build the project from source, use the provided build.sh script. It takes as argument the target platform, which can be either docker or any of targets supported by bun.sh.

# build docker image
./build.sh docker

# build for linux-x64
./build.sh linux-x64

# ...same for other targets