VegiBoxBot

This application is an example on how one could set up a web scraping telegram bot in Python to keep a user base up-to-date about the scraped products.

I run a version of this bot on heroku to keep users up-to-date about their abos at a local vegetable delivery service. As this user base is mainly german speaking, the messages set here to send to the users are all in german language.

Features

The users can:

• set a favorite abo by walking through an inline button guided questionnaire
• set a weekly reminder for their favorite and specify weekday, hour and minute of the reminder
• ask for the abos' ingredients of the current or the next calendar week
• ask for another abos' ingredients of the current or next calendar week by passing arguments
• ask for all abos available
• ask for the currently set favorite
• ask for the currently set reminder
• delete favorite
• delete currently set reminder
• delete all personal data (stored chat id, user name, reminder and favorite)

Prerequisites

1. To use the tool, generally make sure
   1. you created a telegram bot with Telegrams BotFather and have got a valid Bot token for it.
      1. As you can see in the TBot class in TBotEngine, it's even recommended, to set up a second bot for testing purposes.
   2. you installed all the modules from the requirements.txt and potential dependencies.
2. To run the tool on heroku, make sure
   1. you created an account and followed the tutorial on how to deploy a python application.
   2. you added the AddON Heroku Postgres to your app and got the url of the database.
   3. you set following environment variables in heroku:
      1. IS_HEROKU (the value doesn't matter though)
      2. APP_NAME = <Your app name in heroku>
      3. DATABASE_URL = <the database url of your heroku PostgreSQL>
      4. TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN = <the token of your main bot>
   4. you correctly set up a Procfile as mentioned in the tutorials
3. To run the tool locally, make sure
   1. you created a file "Credentials.env" and added following environment keys:
      1. TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN
      2. TELEGRAM_BOT_DEV_TOKEN = <bot token of the bot for local testing purposes>
      3. APP_NAME
      4. HEROKU_API_KEY = <your heroku api>
4. Change all set variables in SqlConnector.py, TBotEngine.py and edit everything else according to your needs!

Known Issues

For a few years now the free version of heroku needs applications to sleep at least for 6 hours within 24 hours. Also, heroku hibernates applications after approx. 30 minutes of no incoming https-requests. For the second issue the service of kaffeine is a valid workaround. As there is no workaround for the first issue, reminders can only be set within hours the application is up.

Future features and enhancements

• Multiple reminders for different days, times and abo weeks
  • Idea is, that a user can set up a reminder on f.e. sunday for his/her favorite abo of the next week and another one on tuesday for his/her favorite of the current week
• Button guided reminder setting
  • implement a procedure to first ask for the week day, then for the time and last whether to remind for the current or the next week
  • difficulities: Combining MessageHandler, ConversationHandler and CallbackQueryHandler

License

MIT

MIT License

Copyright (c) 2022 SimSon2710

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.