telegram.sh

What does it do?

Telegram offers the feature of bots. A bot allows automated systems and servers to send telegram messages to users. Quite often it can be useful to send stuff to yourself. A classic application of this would be receiving results of cronjob tasks via email. Or maybe you want to grab a small file from your server, but downloading it via SCP would be too much work or wouldn't work at all because firewall stuff / filters / proxy servers / whatever.

telegram.sh allows you to send such things via telegram.

Examples

# Send a message to yourself, using a bot token and a chat_id.
telegram -t 123456:AbcDefGhi-JklMnoPrw -c 12345 "Hello, World."

# You can define the token and chat_id in environment variables or config files.
# Then you can just use
telegram "Hello, World."

# Or you send this one message to another chat:
telegram -c 6789 "Hello, Mars."

# You can also send messages to multiple chats:
telegram -c 1234 -c 6789 "Hello, Planets."

# Send stuff via stdin. It will automatically be sent as monospace code:
ls -l | telegram -

# Use markdown in your message (HTML is available as well):
telegram -M "To *boldly* go, where _no man_ has gone before."

# Send a local file.
telegram -f results.txt "Here are the results."

# Or an image, giving you a preview and stuff.
telegram -i solar_system.png # We don't need to send a message if we're
# sending a file.

Requirements

Only bash and curl. Listing known chats with -l requires jq, but you can easily use this tool without this.

Installation / configuration

• Grab the latest telegram file from this repository and put it somewhere.
• Create a bot at telegram:
  • Search for the user @botfather at telegram and start a chat with him.
  • Use the /newbot command to create a new bot. BotFather will give you a token. Keep this.
• Use your telegram client to send a message to your new bot. Any message will do.
• Find your chat id. Run telegram.sh with -l: telegram -t <TOKEN> -l. If you have jq installed, it will nicely list its known chats. The number at the front is your chat id. If you don't have jq installed, it will print a bit of JSON data and tell you what to look for.
• You now have your token and your chat id. Send yourself a first message: telegram -t <TOKEN> -c <CHAT ID> "Hello there."

Carrying the token and the chat id around can be quite cumbersome. You can define them in 4 different ways:

1. In a file /etc/telegram.sh.conf.
2. In a file ~/.telegram.sh.
3. In environment variables TELEGRAM_TOKEN and TELEGRAM_CHAT.
4. As seen above as parameters.

Later variants overwrite earlier variants, so you could define token and chat in /etc/telegram.sh.conf and then overwrite the token with your own in ~/.telegram.sh or on the command line.

The files should look like this:

TELEGRAM_TOKEN="123456:AbcDefGhi-JlkMno"
TELEGRAM_CHAT="12345678"

Please be aware that you should keep your token a secret.