The CVD Channel

A free, open source Telegram Bot Broadcast Channel for keeping up to date on the Coronavirus with the latest news and statistics.

You can get subscribe to the channel here: The CVD Channel

You can also choose to run it yourself or you can contribute to this project.

Requirements

Microsoft Azure Account
Telegram Account
VS Code for Production Deployment and Local Development
Azure Functions VS Code Extension for Local Development
Node.js LTS Version

Hacking

The CVD Bot has support for broadcasting to a private channel that Telegram users can subscribe to.

Telegram Setup

Create a public Telegram channel (not a group).
Add your instance of your CVD Bot to it as an administrator.
Execute the following curl command in your terminal:

curl -X POST https://api.telegram.org/bot[YOUR-API-KEY]/sendMessage\?chat_id\=@NAME_OF_YOUR_CHANNEL\&text\=test-public

In the response, grab the chat_id of the channel, it will be a negative number like -12328834209.

Now, mark your channel as private so users can only consume the content in it.

Execute the following curl command to test the private channel.

curl -X POST https://api.telegram.org/bot[YOUR-API-KEY]/sendMessage\?chat_id\=-11111111111\&text\=test-private

Azure Setup

The following are Azure specific setup requirements and are in chronological order.

Azure Active Directory

Register an AAD application
Get the Application (client) ID
Get the Directory (tenant) ID
Then create a client secret and grab that value and store these in locals.settings.json.
You need all 3 of these as env variables later.
Under API permissions click "Add a Permission" and select Azure Storage and click the checkbox to enable user_impersonation. This will enable us to access the Blob Storage we will create next via our Azure Function client code.

Azure Storage Account

Create a new Blob Container called the-cvd-bot-blob-container.
Under Access Managment (IAM) create a role of type Storage Blob Data Container.
Assign access to an Azure AD User, group or service principal.
Search for your AAD Security Principal (account) that you registered in the prior step.

Local Setup

Clone this repo and install dependencies.

git clone https://github.com/joemccann/the-cvd-channel.git
cd the-cvd-channel
npm i

Create a local.settings.json file in the root of the repo and copy/paste the following:

{
  "IsEncrypted": false,
  "Values": {
    "AzureWebJobsStorage": "YOUR-STORAGE-STRING",
    "AZURE_TENANT_ID": "YOUR-TENANT-ID",
    "AZURE_CLIENT_ID": "YOUR-CLIENT-ID",
    "AZURE_CLIENT_SECRET": "YOUR-SECRET",
    "BLOB_SERVICE_ACCOUNT_NAME": "thecvdbot",
    "FUNCTIONS_WORKER_RUNTIME": "node",
    "CHANNEL_URL": "https://api.telegram.org/bot[YOUR-API-KEY]/sendMessage\?chat_id\=-11111111111\&parse_mode={mode}&text={text}"
  },
  "Host": {
    "LocalHttpPort": 7072
  }
}

The CHANNEL_URL is used for posting messages to your private broadcast channel.

We are adding the LocalHttpPort key and value to not clash with anything running on the default port of 7071 for other Azure Functions.

For tesing your Azure Function locally, you'll need a .env file:

AZURE_TENANT_ID=XXX
AZURE_CLIENT_ID=YYY
AZURE_CLIENT_SECRET=ZZZ
BLOB_SERVICE_ACCOUNT_NAME=thecvdbot
CHANNEL_URL=https://api.telegram.org/bot[YOUR-BOT-TOKEN]/sendMessage?chat_id=[CHAT-ID-PRIVATE]&parse_mode={mode}&text={text}

In VS Code, run your function locally by using the Debug control.

Tests

npm i -D
npm test

Contributing

The general guidelines for contributing are:

Does it fix a bug?
Does it break anything?
Does it stick to the original goal of The CVD Bot (an informational Telegram bot to keep up withg the CVD-19 virus)
Does it reduce the build size?
Is it necessary?

Contributors

@joemccann

License

MIT

joemccann / the-cvd-channel