Telegram-Redmine sync for time tracking activity

Motivation

Time tracking via default Redmine web interface is quite time-consuming and leads to lots of mistakes due to inavailability to edit and delete your issues or log time.

That's a reason why I decided to manage my time tracking activity in smart way via Telegram Channel. This project is aimed to sync any data between Telegram Channel and Redmine, so you're free of routine to move data manually.

Architecture

Project consists of two Docker images:

1. poll_channels is responsible for interaction with Telegram API in order to export, parse and publish channel posts.
2. redmine_pusher is responsible for interaction with Redmine API in order to import data gathered from poll_channels HTTP endpoint.

Usage

Follow these steps to deploy this solution:

1. Create Telegram Channel (either private or public one).
2. Pull the repository, create environment file and configuration file.
3. Create authentication file for interacting with Telegram API.
4. Run docker compose up -d --build to get this stuff up & working.

Step #1: Telegram Channel message format

When you create your own telegram channel for time tracking, you have to follow format rules required by project to properly parse data.

Parse template can be customized in poll_channels configuration (template directive), however the default one works as described:

1. Every telegram message is an atomic unit of your activity and it's parsed line by line
2. 1st line has to contain two entries of regex \d\d:\d\d, other chars are ignored
3. 2-6 lines are parsed as description using regex .*
4. 7+ lines are not parsed and totally ignored

Step #2: create environment and configuration files

Generate an environment file that's required by Docker Compose:

# in the root of project

echo "
COMPOSE_PROJECT_NAME=redmine-integration
PYTHONPATH=.
TZ=Europe/Minsk
LOGLEVEL=INFO

# poll channels
SESSION_NAME=redmine-integration
LISTEN_ADDRESS=0.0.0.0:8080
PHONE=<YOUR-TELEGRAM-PHONE-NUMBER>
API_ID=<API-ID-FOR-TELEGRAM>
API_HASH=<API-HASH-FOR-TELEGRAM>


# redmine pusher
POLL_CHANNELS_URL=http://telegram-poll-channels:8080/data
REDMINE_ADDR=<REDMINE-ADDRESS in format http://domain-name.com>
REDMINE_API_KEY=<REDMINE-ACCESS-API-KEY>
MAX_DAYS=7
" > .env

Generate configuration file that's required by poll_channels module based on example.yml file and placed it in ./secrets directory:

# in the root of project

mkdir -p ./secrets
cp example.yml ./secrets/config.yml
nano ./secrets/config.yml

Step #3: create authentication file

In order to be working poll_channels modules needs Telegram account to access Telegram API. Follow the authentication process to create a session file:

# in the project root directory

mkdir -p ./secrets
pipenv install
pipenv run python3 session_handler/main.py

Screenshots

Messages in Telegram Channel:

Created issue with imported messages in Redmine:

Upstream project

Pay attention that ./session_handler and ./listen_and_repeat_bot/poll_channels are part of Listen & Repeat project.

To keep up-to-date execute the following:

git remote add upstream git@github.com:mdraevich/listen_and_repeat_bot.git
git fetch
git checkout upstream/main -- ./listen_and_repeat_bot/poll_channels
git checkout upstream/main -- ./session_handler

Q&A

What data is pushed to Redmine?

Rules to determine whether data should be pushed are as follows:

• Data is NOT pushed if published today.
• Data is NOT pushed if published after MAX_DAYS from today.
• Data is NOT pushed if published day is equal to start_date value for any of the last 15 issues in your project_id.
• Any other data is pushed to a newly created issue with start_date set to the published day.

When data is pushed?

From 14:00 until 23:59 according to your system time.

How often it checks whether new data is available and has to be pushed?

• poll_channels reads Telegram channel every 30 minutes by default, but it can be overrided by setting polling_interval (in seconds) via config.yml.
• redmine_pusher checks for new data every 30 minutes, but can be overrided by setting POLL_INTERVAL (in seconds) via environment variable.