Set up a Telegram Bot

Introduction

In this tutorial you will learn how to set up a Telegram bot using the Telegram API. This will allow you to receive a message on Telegram after each login on your server.

I am doing this on a Debian installation, but this process should also work on other Linux distributions.

Requirements

You need a running vServer or Root Server from netcup with superuser access.

Step 1 - Installing Telegram

First, install Telegram on your smartphone and open the app.

Step 2 - Creating the bot

Then search for the user "botfather" in the contacts. We create a new bot by sending "botfather" the following message:

/newbot

"botfather" will ask for the name of the bot. You can choose any name you want, but note that the name must be unique. Next, choose a username. This must end with the suffix "_bot".

For example, I used this name / username combination:

Superduperbot for the bot name Superduperbot_bot for the username

"botfather" will now create the bot and generate a token. We will need this later, so write down the token.

Here is an example of how the token looks:

123456090:ABCDEFGHIJK-ABCDEFGHIJK

Step 3 - Configuring the bot

Now, search for the newly created bot in your Telegram contacts. Next, start the bot by clicking on start or sending the message:

/start

Also send at least one normal message to the bot, e.g. foobar to get an ID in the next step.

Next, we point our browser to the address shown below. Replace "TOKEN" with the token you got from "botfather" in the previous step:

https://api.telegram.org/bot"TOKEN"/getUpdates

Write down the row of numbers coming after "id". This is our Telegram "ID" and will be needed in the next step.

Step 4 - Creating the notification script

Head over to your netcup server and create a script under "/etc/profile.d" named something like "telegram_message_on_login.sh" by running the command shown below. Note that any script in "/etc/profile.d" will be executed during each login to your server.

nano /etc/profile.d/telegram_message_on_login.sh

Copy the following into the terminal window. Please replace the values under TOKEN and ID with your specific data:

##!/bin/bash

    TOKEN="123456090:ABCDEFGHIJK-ABCDEFGHIJK"
    ID="123456789"
    HOSTNAME=$(hostname -f)
    DATE="$(date +"%d.%b.%Y--%H:%M")"
    MESSAGE=" $USER logged in at  $DATE on $HOSTNAME !"
    URL="https://api.telegram.org/bot$TOKEN/sendMessage"

    curl -s -X POST $URL -d chat_id=$ID -d text="$MESSAGE" >/dev/null

Last, make the script executable by running this command:

chmod +x /etc/profile.d/telegram_message_on_login.sh

Conclusion

From now on you will receive a message via Telegram everytime someone logs into your server.

License

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicence, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

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