RauchF / BabelBot

A simple chat bot connecting Instant Messaging and Translation APIs

BabelBot

A simple chat bot connecting Instant Messaging and Translation APIs

Guide to Getting Started

Installation

You can either use the precompiled packages, compile BabelBot yourself or use the provided Dockerfile.
You can also deploy BabelBot on a Kubernetes cluster using Helm.

Precompiled packages

1. Grab the latest precompiled release for your platform
2. Configure
3. Run BabelBot.Worker / BabelBot.Worker.exe

Installation from source

1. Make sure you have all prerequisites installed.
2. Download and extract an archive of your desired version (or development branch), or git clone the repository into a path of your choice.
3. Run dotnet publish -c Release to build a release version for your currently used .NET runtime. See the .NET Core documentation for more details on how to use the dotnet CLI utility.
4. Configure
5. Run

Prerequisites

A (possibly incomplete, please report if you had to install more) list of prerequisites:

• .NET Core 6.0 SDK

Build Docker image

1. Make sure you have all prerequisites installed.
2. Download and extract an archive of your desired version (or development branch), or git clone the repository into a path of your choice.
3. Build an image: docker build -t babelbot:local .
   1. You can freely choose the image name and tag.
4. Run BabelBot in Docker: docker run -e Telegram__ApiKey='<api key>' -e Telegram__AllowedUsers__1='<id>' -e DeepL__AuthKey='<auth key>' babelbot:local

Docker Prerequisites

• Docker v20+

Deploy on Kubernetes using Helm

1. Make sure you have all prerequisites installed.
2. Download and extract an archive of your desired version (or development branch), or git clone the repository into a path of your choice.
3. Create a babelbot-values.yaml (details about which values to provide)
4. Run the following command: helm upgrade --install -n babelbot --create-namespace babelbot ./helm -f ./babelbot-values.yaml

Helm Prerequisites

• Helm v3

Configuration

BabelBot uses the configuration facilities provided by .NET Core.

This means configuration can be applied in different ways:

• Changing the values inside appsettings.json
• Setting environment variables (useful for cloud deployments)
• Using user secrets (only during development)

Available configuration parameters

The required configuration values are documented in the table below.

Key (appsettings.json)	Key (Environment)	Type	Description	Default	Required
DeepL:AuthKey	DeepL__AuthKey	string	Your DeepL API auth key	empty	true if DeepL is used
DeepL:DefaultTargetLanguageCode	DeepL__DefaultTargetLanguageCode	string	The target language for DeepL translations (see here for a list of supported values)	en-GB	false
Telegram:ApiKey	Telegram__ApiKey	string	Your Telegram bot's API key	empty	true if Telegram is used
Telegram:AllowedUsers	Telegram__AllowedUsers	array of long	List of Telegram user IDs allowed to use the bot	empty	true if Telegram is used
Telegram:OnlyReactToAllowedUsers	Telegram__OnlyReactToAllowedUsers	boolean	When true, the bot ignores all unknown users	true	false
Worker:Receivers	Worker__Receivers	array of string	List active receivers (instant messengers)	["Telegram"]	true
Worker:Translator	Worker__Translator	string	Translation API to be used	"DeepL"	true

Notes regarding configuration via Environment variables

Some of the configuration parameters are arrays. You can set those with environment variables using the following syntax:

Example

Telegram__AllowedUsers__1=4711
Telegram__AllowedUsers__2=420420

Using user secrets during development

As long as the program is running in the Development environment, you can use the Secret Manager built into dotnet.

Set your API tokens (and other options) with the dotnet command, like this:

dotnet user-secrets set "DeepL:AuthKey" "1234-5678"

They will persist through checkouts and are applied after appsettings.json and environment variables.

See also

• DeepL API Signup - Sign up for DeepL API access here
• DeepL API Docs - Here you can find a list of target language codes supported by DeepL
• Telegram Botfather - Register your Telegram bot here

Contributing

Contributions are always welcome!

See CONTRIBUTING.md for ways to get started.

Please adhere to this project's code of conduct.

Acknowledgements

Massive thanks to (amongst many more) the following projects for making this possible:

• Telegram.Bot for providing a really nice MIT-licensed API library for .NET
• DeepL for creating a fantastic translation service and providing a .NET library for it

Support

This software is provided without warranty or implicit or explicit support.

If you believe you have found an issue (very likely), please issue a bug report as detailed in the contribution guidelines.

In very serious cases, you can send a mail to [e-mail] and I'll try to get back to you.

Please note that I do not provide support for misconfigurations or missing installed dependencies.

License

MIT