webhook-publish

Simple webhook server for JSON HTTP POST requests, to be published via Redis pubsub.

It is intended for incoming updates from Telegram.org bots.

This enables your bot server to receive webhook updates via Redis pubsub as follows:

    const client = redis.createClient(REDIS_URL);
    client.on('message', (channel, message) => {
       logger.debug({channel, message});
    });
    client.subscribe(`telebot:${WEBHOOK_SECRET}`);

where the configured REDIS_URL would be the remote Redis instance also connected to the live HTTPS server deployment of this microservice.

For example, it's deployed at least for my own purposes on telebot.webserva.com.

curl -s https://telebot.webserva.com/echo/testing | jq '.'

{
  "url": "/echo/testing"
}

This is useful for development insomuch as you can use ssh port forwarding to the remote Redis instance, to effectively receive webhook notifications from live Telegram.org bots onto your development machine.

ssh telebot.webserva.com -L6333:127.0.0.1:6379

We can use redis-cli to subscribe too, for monitoring and debugging purposes.

redis-cli -p 6333 subscribe "telebot:${WEBHOOK_SECRET}"

For your bot TOKEN use https://api.telegram.org/botTOKEN/setWebhook with your HTTPS deployment URL. In my case, this is

curl https://api.telegram.org/botTOKEN/setWebhook?url=https://telebot.webserva.com/webhook/SECRET

This service simplifies production for multiple Telegram bots, since each is "hooked up" via a Redis connection, i.e. requiring minimal configuration. The HTTPS server requires Certbot and Nginx, but is a single generic deployment, i.e. done once only and reused e.g. telebot.webserva.com in my personal case.

The path of URL would /webhook/${WEBHOOK_SECRET} where you might generate a random WEBHOOK_SECRET as follows.

dd if=/dev/random bs=32 count=1 2>/dev/null | sha1sum | cut -f1 -d' '

Alternatively see my http://github.com/evanx/secret-base56

docker build -t secret-base56 https://github.com/evanx/secret-base56.git
docker run -e length=40 secret-base56

Your bot should then subscribe to the Redis channel telebot:${WEBHOOK_SECRET} in order to receive these updates via Telegram.org webhook.

Note that your bot would reply to chat commands directly using api.telegram.org/botTOKEN/sendMessage

where the TOKEN for your bot is provided by @BotFather when you use the commands /newbot or /token

For example:

async function sendTelegram(chatId, format, ...content) {
    logger.debug('sendTelegram', chatId, format, content);
    try {
        const text = lodash.trim(lodash.flatten(content).join(' '));
        assert(chatId, 'chatId');
        let uri = `sendMessage?chat_id=${chatId}`;
        uri += '&disable_notification=true';
        if (format === 'markdown') {
            uri += `&parse_mode=Markdown`;
        } else if (format === 'html') {
            uri += `&parse_mode=HTML`;
        }
        uri += `&text=${encodeURIComponent(text)}`;
        const url = `https://api.telegram.org/bot${config.token}/${uri}`;
        const res = await fetch(url);
        if (res.status !== 200) {
            logger.warn('sendTelegram', chatId, url);
        }
    } catch (err) {
        logger.error('sendTelegram', err);
    }
}

Related

https://github.com/evanx/webhook-push - webhooks pushed to persistent list rather than Redis pubsub