Thorin

A simple python bot for Telegram who does things and stuff.

What is Thorin?

Thorin is a chat bot for telegram that makes is easy to add new commands. You can even add new commands while he's running!

How does it work?

Thorin will listen for all messages in a given chat (either directly with him or in a chat room which you invite him to) and looks for his name. Because of the way the Telegram Bot API works his name will include the @ sign as seen at the bottom of thorin.py and will assume that whatever word comes after his name is the name of the command you want to run. I plan on adding "/" command support later but it's not there now.

How do I add new commands?

All you have to do is create a new python script in commands/ that has a function called run which takes two arguments and returns a string, the first argument is the bot itsself and the second is the incoming message object from the python-telegram-bot package. You can read all about that on their github page. If you need to store information you have two options, you can use file based storage as you want though that can be a little hacky and makes your command less portable. The second method is to store it in the bots inventory field which is just a normal pyton dict.

tl;dr: Look at one of the existing commands, you must have a run(bot, incoming_message_object) -> String function. Thorin will send the -> String to the chat room as a message.

How do I make my own bot using this?

You can fork Thorin and rename the bot by editing thorin.py and at the bottom changing the constructor such that "@Thorin_Bot" becomes the name of your bot including the @ symbol. You will need make sure that python, git, and virtualenv are installed, use your distro's package manager to accomplish this an example using my favorite distro openSUSE would be:

sudo zypper in virtualenv python git

After that all you need to do is run the following

git clone (url for your thorin fork) ~/bot
cd ~/bot
virtualenv venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
python thorin.py

Add the & sign to the end of the last command if you want to run thorin in the background (for example on a server you won't stay connected to.)

When you add commands Thorin will pick them up when he's asked to perform them while running, this means that you don't need to restart Thorin to add new commands. However if you edit an existing command Thorin won't reload it until you restart him.

Why the name Thorin?

I'm an alpha nerd and play Dungeons and Dragons, currently I'm playing a Dwarf Tempest Cleric in 5th edition named Thorin. I love Thorin and his name so that's how I named the bot.