VReddit Telegram Bot

A telegram bot which listens for v.redd.it URLs and replies with the video file (including audio)

Usage

Simply add @vreddit_bot to any group, or send it a private message containing a v.redd.it link.

TO DO

Features:

• Publish an initial working PoC and get feedback
• Broadcast an "upload_video" chat action while the user is waiting
• Support inline messages
  • For new videos, send first to "video cache" group to get a file ID
  • 4 options for with/without caption and/or source button
• Support reddit links
• Add reddit post title as video caption
• Include link to source as inline keyboard
• If forwarding to the bot from a group chat, give a button to send the video back to that chat (e.g. via inline)
• If video is > 50 mb, try to use lower quality stream
• Reply to /help with a short text about what the bot can do
• Stop the bot sometimes asking for location info when using inline mode
• Use youtube-dl to add support for youtube & many other sites
  • Check output for "ERROR: Unsupported URL: https://example.com"
  • Probably need to add FFmpeg to PATH
  • Format opts (in config file?): -f 'bestvideo[ext=mp4][filesize<?45M]+bestaudio[ext=m4a][filesize<?5M]/best[ext=mp4][filesize<?50M]'
  • Note that for v.redd.it filesize is not known so we still need to check size of output
• Use streamable.com for videos between 50-500MB? (max 720p & 10min)

Implementation details:

• Set up dev tools (eslint, prettier, jest, husky, CI/CD, README)
• CI: Split deploy to stage/prod into separate jobs so we can see the name in the summary.
• Rename repo & npm package to vreddit-bot
• Increase code coverage / add badges
• Local dev server
• Use async file operations & fix concurrency problems (globally unique file name?)
• CI: Optimise so that we don't run checks twice on releases?
• Set up git-lfs to work with husky. See also: 1, 2, 3
• Tune Azure max workers param
• Try other hosting options to see if it's faster and/or cheaper:
  • Azure x64 Windows host
  • Azure Linux host
  • AWS Lambda
  • Google Cloud Functions
• Collect stats on inline option chosen?

Development

Getting Started

1. Prerequisites:

   • Git
   • Node.js v14 (it must be 14 to match the version in Azure/AWS).
     Tip: You can install & manage multiple Node versions using tools like nodist (Windows) or n (Linux/MacOS/WSL)
   • Yarn

2. git clone the repo and cd into it

3. Run yarn install to install all dependencies

4. Create a .env file in the root of the project with the following params:

   BOT_ERROR_CHAT_ID=<your telegram chat ID>
   BOT_API_TOKEN=<your personal dev bot API token>

   • If you don't konw your telegram chat ID, don't worry. Just set it to 0 and update it later once you've found out your ID from the bot logs.
   • If you don't have a spare bot you can use for local development, make a new bot using the botfather. Don't try use a bot that you are already using for something else, it won't work.

5. Run yarn dev to start local dev server. You can now message your dev bot in telegram to test your code.

Common Commands

# Run a local bot server connected to the bot configured in the `.env` file:
yarn dev

# Run all tests in watch mode:
yarn test:watch

# Auto fix lint/formatting issues (where possible):
yarn lint:fix

# Run the Azure function locally in watch mode:
yarn start

CI/CD

1. Open a pull request to run linting & tests
2. Push to the master branch (e.g. merge a PR) to deploy to staging (@staging_vreddit_bot)
3. Create a tag by running yarn release to deploy to prod (@vreddit_bot)