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FOI

FOI is a publishing bot

Real-time coverage of events for journalists and activists.

This project uses Feathers. An open source web framework for building modern real-time applications.

How does it work?

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.

Supported media

FOI currently supports publishing the following Telegram available media:

  • Text
  • Voice
  • Audio
  • Photo
  • Location
  • Video
  • Video note
  • Stickers (available for Chrome only)

Bot commands

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

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.

Widget

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>

Widget options

Load more options

  • scroll - Load more stories using infinite scroll feature
  • button - Load more stories by clicking on a button (default)

Example using scroll option:

<div class="foi-widget" data-chat="[chatId]" data-more="scroll"></div>

Installing

Configuration

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]"
}

Bot privacy setup

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

Install dependencies through npm or yarn:

$ npm install

or

$ yarn install

Bundle assets

$ npm run build

Start the application

$ npm start

Running on docker

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.

Docker volumes

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!

Bundling assets

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!

Environment variables

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: production

License

Copyright (c) 2017

Licensed under the MIT license.