Real-time coverage of events for journalists and activists.
This project uses Feathers. An open source web framework for building modern real-time applications.
FOI is both a Telegram Bot and a web app. The bot takes the messages it receives and sends it to the app, where its organized, stored and displayed in real-time.
The content is organized by the chats the bot participates in. They are your private chat with the bot and the group chats the bot is invited to.
Creating a new coverage or simply starting a new live feed is as easy as creating a Telegram group:
- Create your new Telegram group inviting the people you'd like to contribute with;
- Invite the bot;
- That's it!
If the invitation is sent by an authorized publisher the bot will start watching the group and publish its content in real-time.
FOI currently supports publishing the following Telegram available media:
- Text
- Voice
- Audio
- Photo
- Location
- Video
- Video note
- Stickers (available for Chrome only)
Available features:
story - Start a new story. Posts will be grouped and displayed in ascending order.
endstory - Finish a running story
mute - Keep the bot from storing your messages
unmute - Allow the bot to store and publish your messages
archive - Archive the chat. All the stories and posts will be displayed in ascending order and the bot will no longer store new messages.
unarchive - Unarchive the chat.
Authentication is performed through Telegram. The app provides an unique token for every anonymous session. Once you click to authenticate, the app will redirect you to send the following message to the bot:
/start [token]
Once the token is validated internally, a socket event containg the authorized user session is emitted to the connection with the validated token in its payload.
FOI also provides a widget for embedding the live feed on another website.
Place widget.js on <head /> or <body />:
<script type="text/javascript" src="https://your-foi-app.com/widget.js" async></script>Place the div with the chat id:
<div class="foi-widget" data-chat="[chatId]"></div>scroll- Load more stories using infinite scroll featurebutton- Load more stories by clicking on a button (default)
Example using scroll option:
<div class="foi-widget" data-chat="[chatId]" data-more="scroll"></div>First you need to create a Telegram bot. Once you send your bot name and the BotFather gives you your bot token you are good to go. Paste it into config/default.json:
"telegram": {
"username": "Your_Bot",
"token": "[your-token-here]"
}Your bot need to be able to receive messages sent to groups, Telegram bots have their privacy mode enabled by default. You need to disable privacy mode by typing /setprivacy to the BotFather and follow its instructions.
Install dependencies through npm or yarn:
$ npm install
or
$ yarn install
$ npm run build
$ npm start
We recommend using docker for development and production environments. With docker and docker-compose installed you can run:
$ docker-compose up
Only use the custom command nodemon src/ on development environment. This command is used for watching code changes and restarting the server.
On docker-compose.yml you'll see the development volumes and the app data volumes.
By persisting the root and node_modules directory while using nodemon src/ command you'll be able to develop using docker while it watches for code changes.
Persisting mongo database, uploaded files and the public directory (bundled assets) you will make sure that the data won't disappear on image upgrades and container renewals. This is important for production use!
This is only required for production.
After the app container is created, you should run the command that generates the static content:
docker exec -it [foi_app_container_name] yarn run build
Access http://localhost:3030 and start talking to your bot!
FOI uses node-config, which means you can also pass your whole configuration through the NODE_CONFIG environment variable
On docker-compose.yml it would look something like this:
services:
app:
environment:
NODE_CONFIG: |-
{
"url": "https://demo.foi.media",
"host": "demo.foi.media"
"rest_of_the_stuff": "value"
}
NODE_ENV: productionCopyright (c) 2017
Licensed under the MIT license.