Hide It Bot

This bot will hide the content of a message by replacing non-blank characters with black blocks, also adding a button underneath the message to reveal the content.

Possible usages

• Sending a book/series/movie spoiler in a group chat so only those users who choose to see it get potentially spoiled.
• Sending a message to someone in wich the text in the notification will be hidden (useful if you fear someone is looking at their screen and maybe reading their notifications).

How to use it:

Use it inline starting your message with @hideitBot

Development

You can try to run the code for this bot directly but I suggest you use docker, concretely docker-composer. To install docker and docker-composer go to: docker compose installation guide.

Set up

The only thing you need to get started is to create a tokens.env file. A good way to create one is to copy tokens.env.sample and replace the fields inside.

Parameters in tokens.env:

• TELEGRAM_TOKEN: (mandatory) The token given by telegram for your bot (ask @botfather for one)
• BOTAN_TOKEN: (optional) If you want to use botan for traking your users place here your token.
• WEBHOOK_DOMAIN: (optional) If you are going to use the bot with webhooks you have to specify the domain the bot will be running in. See webhooks section for more details.

Running with docker

You can launch the dockerized bot with just one command. This will launch the database first and then the bot and connect them together.

docker-compose up --build

Refer to the docker-compose command documentation for more options.

In case you want to change the command you want to run or see stdout in the terminal try running docker-compose build bot and docker-compose run -it bot

Running manually

First you need to have a functionning mongodb installation accessible at the url mongodb (try modifying etc/hosts), without password.

Then you need all of the ruby dependencies: bundle install

After you can run the bot if at the root directory you run the command ruby src/long_polling.rb, or puma -b tcp://0.0.0.0:80 src/server.ru.

Production

For running in a server there is a different docker-compose file called docker-compose-prod.yml. By default it will use webhooks. You can run all the docker commands mentioned before but adding -f docker-compose-prod.yml just after docker-compose in every command.

Webhooks

The server this bot will create doesn't handle the https connections needed for telegram. You should put this bot behind a proxy that will handle that. What the bot will do is generating a token (placed in the bot's url) that will be sent to telegram upon startup, activating webhooks (in case they were not) at the same time.

Here is a sample vhost configuration file for apache2 that will provide the bot endpoint with authentication for telegram. The certificates have been obtained via let's encrypt.

<IfModule mod_ssl.c>
Listen 88
<VirtualHost *:88 >
        ServerName example.com
        ProxyPreserveHost On
        ProxyPass / http://localhost:8801/
        ProxyPassReverse / http://localhost:8801
        SSLEngine On
        SSLCertificateFile /etc/letsencrypt/path/to/cert.pem
        SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/letsencrypt/path/to/privkey.pem
        SSLCertificateChainFile /etc/letsencrypt/path/to/chain.pem
        Include /etc/letsencrypt/options-ssl-apache.conf
        <Location \>
                SSLRequireSSL On
                SSLVerifyClient optional
                SSLVerifyDepth 1
                SSLOptions +StdEnvVars +StrictRequire
        </Location>
        ErrorLog "/var/log/apache2/telegram-error.log"
        CustomLog "/var/log/apache2/telegram-access.log" common
</VirtualHost>

</IfModule>

In this case I have used the dafult port for the bot (which is 8801 and can be changed in docker-compose-prod.yml) and port 88 as outside port. If you try to do this too you should specify the port 88 in the domain name in tokens.env.