Important notice

Please use the administration branch for now. This branch is no longer under development, and new features will not be added. Only bug fixes will be merged.

otouto

The plugin-wielding, multipurpose Telegram bot.

Public Bot | Official Channel | Bot Development Group

otouto is a plugin-based, IRC-style bot written in Lua for the Telegram Bot API.

otouto (including all plugins and documentation) is free software; you are free to redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3. See LICENSE for details.

The Manual

Setup

To get your bot running as soon as possible, see Quick start.

otouto uses Lua (5.3 is recommended) and the following Lua libraries: luasocket, luasec, multipart-post, dkjson, and lpeg. If you are using Lua 5.2, luautf8 is also required. It is recommended you install these with Luarocks. This can be done easily on Ubuntu with the install-dependencies.sh script.

To get started, clone the repository and set the following values in config.lua:

• bot_api_key as your bot authentication token from the BotFather.
• admin as your Telegram ID.

Some plugins are not enabled by default. If you wish to enable them, add their names (sans file extension) to the plugins table in the configuration file.

When you are ready to start the bot, run the launch.sh script. This script will automatically restart the bot five seconds after being stopped. If this behavior is undesired, start the bot manually with lua main.lua.

To stop the bot, send "/halt" through Telegram. You can exit with Ctrl-C (or two Ctrl-C if using launch.sh), but this is not recommended as it risks data loss.

Note that certain plugins, such as translate.lua and greetings.lua, will require privacy mode to be disabled. Additionally, some plugins may require or make use of various API keys and/or other configuration values not set by default. See Configuration for details.

Quick start

1. Clone the repository. git clone http://otou.to/code otouto
2. Install dependencies: Lua and the following Lua libs: luasocket, luasec, multipart-post, dkjson, and lpeg.†
3. Add your bot token and Telegram ID to config.lua.
4. Start the bot with ./launch.sh.

† On Ubuntu, this can be done easily with the install-dependencies.sh script.

Configuration

otouto is configured in the config.lua file. It is the single point of configuration for the bot, and contains any necessary user-specific variables, such as API keys, custom error messages, and enabled plugins.

This section includes an exhaustive list of possible configuration values for otouto and official plugins.

Bot configuration values

Error messages

These are the generic error messages used by most plugins. These belong in a table named errors.

Plugins table

This table is an array of the names of enabled plugins. To enable a plugin, add its name to the list.

Plugin configuration values

Some plugins have many configuration values which warrant their own section of the configuration file. That section will be the name of the plugin, without the file extension. They are listed below.

hackernews.lua

remind.lua

chatter.lua

greetings.lua

The greetings table is a list of custom responses for the greetings plugin. Each value is an array of triggers, and the key for that array is the response. The default values are inserted by the greetings plugin if there is no user configuration. In the responses, #NAME is replaced with the user's name or nickname. The bot's name is automatically appended to all triggers. Triggers are not case sensitive.

reactions.lua

The reactions table is also a list of custom responses, for the reactions plugin. Each value is a key/value pair, where the key is the trigger, and the value is the reaction. The reactions plugin differs from the greetings plugin by how it is triggered: A reaction command must be at the beginning or end of a line. Reactions may be formatted with HTML. Configuration values should be pre-escaped.

eightball.lua

The eightball table is an array of custom responses for the eightball plugin.

Control plugins

Some plugins are designed to be used by the bot's owner. Here are some examples, how they're used, and what they do.

Group Administration

The administration plugin enables self-hosted, single-realm group administration, supporting both normal groups and supergroups whch are owned by the bot owner. This works by sending TCP commands to an instance of tg running on the owner's account.

To get started, compile the test branch of tg-cli. On Ubuntu and Debian, this can be done easily with the tg-install.sh script.

Once the compilation is finished, enable the administration plugin in your config file. You may have reason to change the default TCP port (4567); if that is the case, remember to change it in tg-launch.sh as well. Run ./tg-launch.sh in a separate screen/tmux window. You'll have to enter your phone number and go through the login process the first time. The script is set to restart tg after two seconds, so you'll need to Ctrl+C after exiting.

While tg is running, you may start/reload otouto with administration.lua enabled, and have access to a wide variety of administrative commands and automata. The administration "database" is stored in administration.json. To start using otouto to administrate a group (note that you must be the owner (or an administrator)), send /gadd to that group. For a list of commands, use /ahelp. Below I'll describe various functions now available to you.

† Moderators may only use these commands if the modrights flag is enabled.

Internal commands can only be run within an administrated group.

Description of Privileges

Obviously, each greater rank inherits the privileges of the lower, positive ranks.

Flags

antiflood

antiflood (flag 5) provides a system of automatic flood protection by removing users who post too much. It is entirely configurable by a group's governor, an administrator, or the bot owner. For each message to a particular group, a user is awarded a certain number of "points". The number of points is different for each message type. When the user reaches 100 points, he is removed. Points are reset each minute. In this way, if a user posts twenty messages within one minute, he is removed.

Default antiflood values:

Additionally, antiflood can be configured to automatically ban a user after he has been automatically kicked from a single group a certain number of times in one day. This is configurable as the antiflood value autoban and is set to three by default.

List of plugins

Plugins

otouto uses a robust plugin system, similar to yagop's Telegram-Bot.

Most plugins are intended for public use, but a few are for other purposes, like those for use by the bot's owner. See here for a list of plugins.

A list of standard plugin components:

No component is required, but some depend on others. For example, action will never be run if there's no triggers, and doc will never be seen if there's no command.

If a plugin's action returns true, on_message will continue its loop.

When an action or cron function fails, the exception is caught and passed to the handle_exception utilty and is either printed to the console or send to the chat/channel defined in log_chat in config.lua.

Interactions with the bot API are straightforward. See the Bindings section for details.

Several functions used in multiple plugins are defined in utilities.lua. Refer to that file for usage and documentation.

Bindings

Calls to the Telegram bot API are performed with the bindings.lua file through the multipart-post library. otouto's bindings file supports all standard API methods and all arguments. Its main function, bindings.request, accepts three arguments: method, parameters, file. Before using it, initialize the bindings module with its init function, passing your bot token as the argument.

method is the name of the API method. parameters (optional) is a table of key/value pairs of the method's parameters to be sent with the method. file (super optional) is a table of a single key/value pair, where the key is the name of the parameter and the value is the filename (if these are included in parameters instead, otouto will attempt to send the filename as a file ID).

Additionally, any method can be called as a key in the bindings table (for example, bindings.getMe). The bindings.gen function (which is also the __index function in its metatable) will forward its arguments to bindings.request in their proper form. In this way, the following two function calls are equivalent:

bindings.request(
    'sendMessage',
    {
        chat_id = 987654321,
        text = 'Quick brown fox.',
        reply_to_message_id = 54321,
        disable_web_page_preview = false,
        parse_mode = 'Markdown'
    }
)

bindings.sendMessage{
    chat_id = 987654321,
    text = 'Quick brown fox.',
    reply_to_message_id = 54321,
    disable_web_page_preview = false,
    parse_mode = 'Markdown'
}

Furthermore, utilities.lua provides two "shortcut" functions to mimic the behavior of otouto's old bindings: send_message and send_reply. send_message accepts these arguments: self, chat_id, text, disable_web_page_preview, reply_to_message_id, use_markdown. The following function call is equivalent to the two above:

utilities.send_message(987654321, 'Quick brown fox.', false, 54321, true)

Uploading a file for the sendPhoto method would look like this:

bindings.sendPhoto({ chat_id = 987654321 }, { photo = 'dankmeme.jpg' } )

and using sendPhoto with a file ID would look like this:

bindings.sendPhoto{
    chat_id = 987654321,
    photo = 'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ123456789'
}

Upon success, bindings will return the deserialized result from the API. Upon failure, it will return false and the result. In the case of a connection error, it will return two false values. If an invalid method name is given, bindings will throw an exception. This is to mimic the behavior of more conventional bindings as well as to prevent "silent errors".

Database

otouto doesn't use one. This isn't because of dedication to lightweightedness or some clever design choice. Interfacing with databases through Lua is never a simple, easy-to-learn process. As one of the goals of otouto is that it should be a bot which is easy to write plugins for, our approach to storing data is to treat our datastore like any ordinary Lua data structure. The "database" is a table accessible in the database value of the bot instance (usually self.database), and is saved as a JSON-encoded plaintext file each hour, or when the bot is told to halt. This way, keeping and interacting with persistent data is no different than interacting with a Lua table -- with one exception: Keys in tables used as associative arrays must not be numbers. If the index keys are too sparse, the JSON encoder/decoder will either change them to keys or throw an error.

Alone, the database will have this structure:

{
    users = {
        ["55994550"] = {
            id = 55994550,
            first_name = "Drew",
            username = "topkecleon"
        }
    },
    userdata = {
        ["55994550"] = {
            nickname = "Worst coder ever",
            lastfm = "topkecleon"
        }
    },
    version = "3.11"
}

database.users will store user information (usernames, IDs, etc) when the bot sees the user. Each table's key is the user's ID as a string.

database.userdata is meant to store miscellanea from various plugins.

database.version stores the last bot version that used it. This is to simplify migration to the next version of the bot an easy, automatic process.

Data from other plugins is usually saved in a table with the same name of that plugin. For example, administration.lua stores data in database.administration.

Output style

otouto plugins should maintain a consistent visual style in their output. This provides a recognizable and comfortable user experience.

Titles

Title lines should be bold, including any names and trailing punctuation (such as colons). The exception to this rule is if the title line includes a query, which should be italic. It is also acceptable to have a link somewhere inside a title, usually within parentheses. eg:

Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977)

Search results for star wars:

Changelog for otouto (Github):

Lists

Numerated lists should be done with the number and its following punctuation bolded. Unnumbered lists should use the bullet character ( • ). eg:

1. Life as a quick brown fox.

2. The art of jumping over lazy dogs.

and

• Life as a quick brown fox.

• The art of jumping over lazy dogs.

Links

Always name your links. Even then, use them with discretion. Excessive links make a post look messy. Links are reasonable when a user may want to learn more about something, but should be avoided when all desirable information is provided. One appropriate use of linking is to provide a preview of an image, as xkcd.lua and apod.lua do.

Other Stuff

User IDs should appear within brackets, monospaced ([123456789]). Descriptions and information should be in plain text, but "flavor" text should be italic. The standard size for arbitrary lists (such as search results) is eight within a private conversation and four elsewhere. This is a trivial pair of numbers (leftover from the deprecated Google search API), but consistency is noticeable and desirable.

Contributors

Everybody is free to contribute to otouto. The most direct way of doing this is to fork and start making pull requests. If you have an idea and are not sure how to implement it, feel free to open an issue.

The creator and maintainer of otouto is topkecleon. A list of contributors can be found here.

If code or ideas aren't your thing, the project does accept monetary contributions. Bitcoin donations are accepted at the following address: 1GJGke82JthhcEcpgnC9qNp7B4sfsGsQSN.

Here's a list of donors: