How you can integrate Telegram Bots with Ruby on Rails and manage bot subscribers stored in a database

1. Integrating Telegram Bots
with Rails
Chris Downey
cdowney@protonmail.com
Please install Telegram on your phone or laptop for
hands-on experience during the presentation
https://telegram.org/
it will also be more interesting when we get into managing subscriptions
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2. Create a DCRug Telegram bot
Bots are third-party apps that run
inside Telegram.
Our Rails app controls the bot,
providing the content, managing
subscribers, interactions, and
broadcasts.
Our bot will send DCRug event listings
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3. Create a DCRug Telegram bot
Start by using a bot to create your bot
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4. Now that DCRug bot is created,
how do we communicate with it?
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5. With bots, we can have 2 types of communication:
1. Subscriber initiated
2. Bot (Rails app) initiated
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6. Subscriber initiated communication
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7. Bot (Rails app) initiated communication
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8. Capture real-time Telegram bot events
Just for fun: first article on web hooks (may have coined term):
http://progrium.com/blog/2007/05/03/web-hooks-to-revolutionize-the-web/
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9. We will setup DCRug bot with a webhook, and use
ngrok to create a secure tunnel to my dev machine
and to inspect the webhook payload
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10. 10

11. Setup dev machine to accept webhooks from
Telegram with ngrok
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12. If you have Telegram installed, please subscribe
Via browser: http://telegram.me/DCRug_bot
Via Telegram: go into “Chats” and search for DCRug
(please call out if this isn’t working for you)
secret command /count provides number of subscribers
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13. What just happened?
Our bot (Rails app!):
• intercepted a webhook
• extracted the bot command
• created a subscriber in the database
• sent a response to the new subscriber
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14. Intercept a webhook
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15. Extract bot command from webhook payload
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16. Create a subscriber in the database
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17. Send response to the new subscriber
use telegram-bot-ruby gem to wrap and simplify Telegram API
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18. 18
Pop Quiz!
how can we broadcast DCRug events,
right now, to all active subscribers?

19. Broadcast DCRug events to all subscribers
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20. The End
Questions, comments, thoughts?
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(See me after the meeting for an example of another very different bot if interested, it
enables searches across 2 websites and a database of tweets going back 6 years)

21. A bot serving a small
educational non-profit
https://telegram.me/VaxCalc_bot
Searches a database of more than 1,100 “foundational
knowledge” tweets produced since 2010
Combines results with custom Google search of 2
content-heavy websites with articles going back 30 years
good search: allergy
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(to be fixed) Subscribers receive 4:10 pm notification of “trending” tweet past 24 hours