Mamasodikov / telegram-to-rss

Telegram Bot to generate an RSS feed from group messages

Telegram To RSS

Generate an RSS feed from your Telegram Channel.

Why did I make this?

I run a personal website and want it to be a centralized place where I can have everything I ever published on the web. I also don't want to have a telegram integration on that website and prefer having a unified way of accessing my web artifacts.

With the project I can turn my Telegram channel posts into RSS feed and parse it on my personal website.

How does it work?

This Project is consisted of two distinct services:

• Telegram Bot Handler
• Express File Server

Telegram Bot Handler

This service listens to messages on the discussion group chat of you channel.

When you post a message on your channel, Telegram will automatically forward the message to the corresponding discussion group, then the bot will process the message and update the RSS feed accordingly.

Express File Server

When the Bot Handler receives the message and updates the RSS Feed, it writes an rss.xml file in the public/ directory which is served by the express static file server.

Thus you can access the RSS feed via: <SERVER_URL>/rss.xml.

Getting Started

In order to use this project, you need:

• Telegram Bot
  • Create one with BotFather
  • Disable group privacy mode
  • Copy the API KEY
• Telegram Channel
  • After creating the channel, create a discussion group.
  • Add the newly created bot account to the discussion group.

Afterwards, clone the project and install the dependencies:

git clone https://github.com/rasjonell/telegram-to-rss

cd telegram-to-rss

npm install

Configuration

Follow the .env.example file to setup your environment.

Note: You need to create separate .env.{NODE_ENV} files for each environment(i.e. .env.dev will be used when testing locally)

Name	Type	Description
PORT	Number	File Server Port
GROUP_ID	String	Your Channel ID
BOT_TOKEN	String	Your Bot's API key
GROUP_USERNAME	String	Your Channel Username
AUTHOR	String	RSS Feed Author Name
WEBSITE_HOST	String	URL Of The RSS Feed Host Website

Available Scripts

• npm start - starts the project.
• npm run watch - starts nodemon development server.
• npm run build - builds the TypeScript project.

TODOs

• Make RSS feed metadata configurable
• Persist the auto-generated RSS Feed so stopping/restarting the process does not override it.
• Make Feed generation configurable(Currently only the messages from the Channel admin are allowed, but some may want to also include discussion messages from other members(i.e. replies)).