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.
# 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."
# Split them into multiple lines
telegram "Hello,"$'\n'"World."
# or
echo -e "Hello\nWorld." | telegram -
# 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.
# Or a video.
telegram -V video.mp4
# Use environment variables to tell curl to use a proxy server:
HTTPS_PROXY="socks5://127.0.0.1:1234" telegram "Hello, World."
# Check the curl documentation for more info about supported proxy
# protocols.Only bash and curl. Listing known chats with -l requires jq, but you can
easily use this tool without this.
- Grab the latest
telegramfile from this repository and put it somewhere. - Create a bot at telegram:
- Search for the user
@botfatherat telegram and start a chat with him. - Use the
/newbotcommand to create a new bot. BotFather will give you a token. Keep this.
- Search for the user
- 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 havejqinstalled, it will nicely list its known chats. The number at the front is your chat id. If you don't havejqinstalled, 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 6 different ways:
- In a file
/etc/telegram.sh.conf. - In a file
~/.telegram.sh. - In a file
~/.telegram.sh.conf. - In a file in the same folder as this script, called
./telegram.sh.conf. - In environment variables TELEGRAM_TOKEN and TELEGRAM_CHAT.
- 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"Multiple chat ids can be defined in a config file as a bash array:
TELEGRAM_TOKEN="123456:AbcDefGhi-JlkMno"
CHATS=(12345678, 23456789, 34567)With such config command telegram.sh "Hello world" will deliver message to all listed chat ids.
Please be aware that you should keep your token a secret.
You can also add permanent proxy settings in there by adding:
export HTTPS_PROXY="socks5://127.0.0.1:1234"See the curl documentation for more information about which proxy protocols are supported.
docker build -t telegram:latest .
docker run -it --rm telegram- New option
-Vto send a video file. - Configuration can now also be set from a file called
.telegram.sh.confin the same folder as this script.
- New option
-mto receive the last received message. You could use this e.g. to regularly poll the last message and react on commands. Format of the response is<Message ID> <Sender ID> <Chat ID> <Text>. You could use this feature like this:telegram -m | read message_id sender_id chat_id text echo "MessageID: $message_id" echo "Text: $text"
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