This project is used for creating a telegram bot for the purposes of spilting a bill between a group of people. This telegram bot can be deploy to Heroku and makes use of webhooks for communicating with the telegram API.

Instructions for setting up and running locally. Note: The commands state here are meant for windows, use the appropriate commands for other OSs.

1. Download and install the latest version of python
2. Create your bot using botfather on telegram and get the access token
3. Download ngrok
   • you can place the .exe file in the same working directory of this project

Go into configs/config.cfg and paste your token

[creds]
token = <ADD ACCESS TOKEN HERE>

Next, run the following command to install the necessary python libs to handle the API request and responds

pip install requests bottle

Note: you can also python virtualenv which will enable you to create multiple virtual python environments

1. We need to start ngrok and get the https public IP address that will be forwarding to our localhost server. Run the following command in the directory of ngrok.exe.

   ngrok http 5000
   

   Copy the https public IP address from the output and keep ngrok running. This IP addressed are randomly assigned and they change each time we start and stop ngrok hence, we need to repeat the set up for the webhook everytime it changes.

2. Next, simple go to your browser and in the input bar enter this

   https://api.telegram.org/bot<Your Bot Accees Token>/setWebHook?url=https://<Public IP address from ngrok>
   

   If successfully setup there should be an response with a ok message.

   Note: you can check the status of your webhook with https://api.telegram.org/bot[Your Bot Accees Token]/getWebHookInfo

Finally, we can now run our bot locally. Simple go to the program directory and enter the following command

python server.py

1. Have git installed
2. Create a free Heroku account and download and install Heroku cli

1. in your terminal in the same directory as the project, enter the following command

   heroku login
   

   This will log you into your heroku account which will be used for deploying the bot.

2. Next run the follwing command to create the app

   heroku create 
   

   Copy the the https link to your web app from the output. Note: you can use "heroku create " to create an app with a given name. Otherwise it will be randomly generated.

3. In your browser, enter the following link to set the Webhook for the bot.

   https://api.telegram.org/bot<Your Bot Accees Token>/setWebHook?url=https://<your Heroku Web App address>
   

In server.py, the comment for localhost config and remove the commentted for the heroku config as shown below.

#app.run(host="localhost", port="5000") ## Used for running locally
app.run(host="0.0.0.0", port=int(os.environ.get("PORT", 5000))) ## used for running on Heroku

Finally, in your terminal in the same directory as the project, enter the following command

git commit -m "update to server"
heroku git:remote -a <YourAppName>
git push heroku master

If you have not created your local git repo yet then first run the commands below instead

git init
git add .
git commit -m "first commit"
heroku git:remote -a <YourAppName>
git push heroku master

Once the finally command has executed, you can head over to your telegram bot and start chatting with it! Note: you can use "heroku logs" command in the terminal to view the application logs.

1. Heroku will read requirements.txt and installed the libs which are required to execute the program.
2. It will use Procfile identify the process type and to execute the subsequent command.