Telegram custom news aggregator

Version history

v 1.0: Provides the headlines or digests of chosen telegram channels for the period of time.
v 1.1: User can subscribe or unsubscribe from specific channels.

Bot in action

To check how it works just try it yourself https://t.me/news_custom_aggregator_bot

• Press start or send a message /start
• Use the buttons or keyboard to get news or digests from different sources.
• Use /settings to check and change subscriptions.
• Use /help to get additional information.

How to start

• Create and fill in .env in the root folder of the project (folder with main.py and .env.example).
• Create user_settings.json in the users folder. It is advised to copy data from users_settings.json.example.
• Run main.py
• Terminal will ask you for bot token and phone number. Provide this information. For details see "Sessions" below.

Important. Telegram custom news aggregator uses "Bot API" and "Telegram API", bot and userbot accordingly. Which means you need to have a bot and a telegram account.

Sessions

In order to use a bot you need to provide some credentials. Pyrogram uses session files for this purpose. Below are the actions to create these files.

• Start the bot locally (run main.py).
• Provide necessary data in terminal for bot session (bot token).
• Stop the bot.
• Launch bot again.
• Ask bot for digest or headers.
• Enter phone and confirmation code for userbot.
• If you use remote server: copy my_bot.session and my_userbot.session into the folder of your project on the remote server (for example: scp -i path_to_my_ssh_key my_bot.session [email protected]:~/tg_news_aggregator)

How to obtain api_id: https://core.telegram.org/api/obtaining_api_id
How to obtain bot token: https://core.telegram.org/bots/tutorial#obtain-your-bot-token

.env file

• API_ID - get it using the guide https://core.telegram.org/api/obtaining_api_id \
• API_HASH - get it using the guide https://core.telegram.org/api/obtaining_api_id \
• BOT_TOKEN - get it using the guide https://core.telegram.org/bots/tutorial#obtain-your-bot-token \
• CHANNELS - channels which will be parsed to get news; at the moment username of the channel is used, NOT id; in the current version 1.0 the channels are hardcoded, so use the value provided in .env.example
• TIME_PERIOD_MINUTES - get news for this period, default value is 720 (hint: 720 is 12 hours, 1440 is 24 hours).
• MAX_MESSAGE_LENGTH - maximus length of message in telegram, used to split too long messages; default value is 4096, higher values will cause error.
• MESSAGES_PER_CHANNEL_LIMIT - amount of messages which userbot will read from one telegram channel; recommended values are from 50 to 100.
• ADMIN_CHAT_ID - optional, sends the message to the according chat if there is some error or other administrative issue; default value is empty (literally, nothing after =).
• DEBUG - used in code to trigger debug mode; default value is False.

Users settings

Each user may subscribe or unsubscribe from any channel available in the .env file (field CHANNELS). All subscriptions are stored in the users\user_settings.json. The file has the following structure:

[
    {
        "id": "0000000",  # telegram id of the user
        "channels": [     # subscriptions of the user
            "bbcrussian",
            "fontankaspb"
        ]
    },
    {
        "id": "1111111",
        "channels": [
            "fontankaspb"
        ]
    },
]

GitHub Workflow

Workflow checks that code is formatted according to the black standard. Remove job 'linter' from the workflow if you use another standard.
Be aware, that workflow launches docker system prune -f after deployment. You may consider to remove this line.

How to deploy to the remote server

• Copy my_bot.session and my_userbot.session (see details in "Sessions").
• Create folder users with file user_settings.json.
• To start the container run the following commands in your server terminal:

sudo docker compose -f docker-compose-production.yaml pull
sudo docker compose -f docker-compose-production.yaml down
sudo docker compose -f docker-compose-production.yaml up -d

Tech stack

Python 3.12
Pyrogram 2.0

Author

Resistor