10 McJ bot

Daily, I receive an audio and text from 10 Minutes with Jesus. I'm responsible for forwarding them to Telegram and Signal after making a couple changes to the text.

That is a repetitive task that this repo's app automates. Currently, I just have to forward the text and audio to the Telegram bot, and it gives me the text and audio messages ready to be forwarded to Telegram and Signal.

List of features

• Message handling in portuguese language
  • Format text messages for Signal
  • Format an audio+text (or just text if audio is missing) message for Telegram
• As a security measure, persist how many messages a user sent to the bot. The bot can't read group messages nor be added to a group.
• Image editing
  • Generate a thumbnail for the portuguese 10McJ channel
  • Add an image to the image database
  • Choose an image from the database to use in thumbnail generation

Current works

The project is being upgraded now. The goal is to automate the entire process of publishing the 10 Minutes with Jesus meditations. These are the current goals:

• Sending every message automatically
  • WhatsApp
  • Telegram
  • Signal
• Posting the YouTube video automatically
  • Editing a cover image
  • Joining the image and the audio, using a video editing API
  • Posting the video on YouTube with the Google API
• (Eventually) Posting the meditation to the podcast media (Spotify, Google Podcasts, etc.). This might not be needed since it is so quick and easy to do manually.

Check out the wiki, where I plan the project.

Developing

You can use this app to control your own bot. From here on out, a little knowledge about the Telegram Bot API is useful to understand some topics.

Running scripts

npm start is optimal for production because it compiles the TypeScript code to JavaScript and then runs the JS, which makes the app faster than if the TS is run directly with ts-node.

However, ts-node is better for development because it doesn't allow the app to start if build is failing. So despite the coolness of the npm run dev script, which concurrently runs tsc -w and nodemon build/app.js, npm run ts-dev is most likely preferable. Note: in dev we're constantly recompiling the app, which leaves behind a build/ directory, which doesn't happen in production builds. That's why compiling->running is no problem in production while making things confusing in dev.

Run tests with npm run test, but create a .test.env file first. Speaking of envs...

Environment variables

Building the app requires the following environment variables to be defined:

• BOT_TOKEN: the bot's Token, the one The Botfather gave you.
• ADMIN_CHAT_ID: the admin's Telegram chat ID (a number). In the case of this bot, it's my chat ID. This value can be found on the bot's updates.
• RUNNING_ENV: self-explained. Accepts 'production', ' development' or 'test' as value.
• DB_TYPE: accepts 'local' or 'mongodb' as values.
  • MONGODB_URL: if DB_TYPE is 'mongodb', the access URL should be specified. It's not necessary otherwise.
• CHANNEL: if messages are meant to be sent directly to a Telegram channel, its public handler should be specified.

Roadmap

(newest to oldest)

• Editing a video
• Using CanvasJS to edit images
• Webpage to view the images
• Storing images
• Persisting in-requests