COVIDBOT

Play with it, just look for @italiandailycovidbot on Telegram (if my home server is still up, no promises here :-) ).

Simple Telegram bot written in NodeJS. Retrieves italian state-level COVID-19 infection numbers from the Italian Civil Protection GitHub repository and provides upon request a plot of the last 3 months values. Also, an user can subscribe and receive updates every evening at about 5pm (new data is published daily around that time).

Also, the bot now sports region-level and province-level digests with plot:

Supported commands

• /sub - Subscribe to daily COVID-19 updates
• /unsub - Unsubscribe
• /status - Subscription status
• /plot - Request actual situation plot
• /digest - Request daily digest
• /region - Request daily region-level digest and plot
• /region name - As above, for a specific region (with plot)
• /provincia - Provincial level data (list of today's most hit provinces)
• /provincia name - Provincial data for a specific province (with plot)
• /about - About
• /help - Commands list

Technical details

The code implements a simple bot by leveraging the node-telegram-bot-api library. Upon startup, it downloads and parses COVID-19 data from the Italian Civil Protection GitHub repository; then, upon /plot request, it creates a plot and sends it to the requestor as a PNG image. There is also a /digest feature for a daily text digest, and a /region command for region-level data and plot.

The bot also has a simplified subscription feature, by which an user can request to be subscribed to daily updates (either in a private chat with the bot or inside any other chat the bot has been added to). The bot will store the chat id of the request (in a REDIS server). Every day at around 5pm (italian time) new COVID-19 data is retrieved and then the plot function is invoked for all the subscribers, who will subsequently receive the new plot.

How to run as-is

This code is far from great and is provided as a learning opportunity, both for you and for me. However, if you want to be able to just download it and run the bot as you own, and you have docker on your pc, you need to:

1. Have docker and docker-compose installed on your system.

2. Retrieve the project from git.

3. Create a .env file copying the .env-example and writing your token:

   BOT_TOKEN=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

   You need to initialize your own bot by chatting with the Botfather on Telegram, then you'll get the key. If you are running with docker the other parameters should be already fine.

4. Then

   docker-compose up -d
   // If you have made some kind of update use instead:
   // docker-compose up -d --build

   should do the trick.

   To halt it:

   docker-compose down
   

Kaspersky Internet Security and similar shit

If you are in a working environment and you have some kind of stupid shit which is messing with your certificates and SSL connections, you could stumble on a "Error: self signed certificate in certificate chain" while trying to build/run local machine. Apparently, you can get around that by disabling the certificate validation for the current session:

// Windows only
set NODE_TLS_REJECT_UNAUTHORIZED=0

I know, I know, disabling security features is BAD, but I wasted too much time on that. Look that up and make your choice. Please don't do that in prod, but it is probably ok in dev.

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License

CC-BY-4.0 - Show license text