# TeleNotify

TeleNotify by [ppati000](http://twitter.com/ppati000) enables your Rails app to send notifications/messages to your users via Telegram's Bot API. Forget email newsletters!

A working demo can be tested [here](http://telenotify.herokuapp.com/). For the source, see the [TeleTest repository](https://github.com/ppati000/TeleTest/)

## Installation

Note: For any news, questions, suggestions or anything else, contact and/or follow me on [Twitter](http://twitter.com/ppati000) or send me a [mail](mailto:ppati000@me.com)

### Prerequisites

Needless to say, you need a Telegram bot account first. To generate a new Telegram bot, message [@botfather](https://telegram.me/botfather) on Telegram. For more information, see the [official guide](https://core.telegram.org/bots#botfather).
During this process, you will obtain a token which you will need in the following steps.

### Install

Just add the following to your Gemfile.

```ruby
#Gemfile
gem 'tele_notify', '~> 0.1'
```

And follow that up with a ``bundle install``.

### Setup and Database Migrations

TeleNotify uses a telegram_users table to store all users. To
generate and run the migration just use.

    rails generate tele_notify:migration

This will also generate a config file in ```config/initializers/tele_notify.rb```. Make sure to set your Telegram token and application URLs here. It should look something like this:

```ruby
#Set your home URL, so Telegram callbacks work
#For production, just use your URL (e.g. https://myapp.com)
#You MUST NOT include a trailing slash and it MUST be https!
#INVALID URLS: e.g. http://myapp.com or https://myapp.com/
TeleNotify::TelegramUser.configure_home_url("YOUR PRODUCTION URL")

#For development, download ngrok from https://ngrok.com/.
#Extract it and run "./ngrok http 3000"
#Then copy the URL you get from the console window.
#Remember to use the HTTPS URL!
TeleNotify::TelegramUser.configure_dev_url("YOUR NGROK DEVELOPMENT URL")

#Set your Telegram Bot API token here
#Don't have your token yet? Create your bot using https://telegram.me/botfather
TeleNotify::TelegramUser.configure_token("YOUR TOKEN")
```

Next, add two lines of code to make your ApplicationController look like this:

```ruby
#app/controllers/application_controller.rb
class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
  protect_from_forgery with: :exception

  #IMPORTANT! THESE TWO LINES MUST COME AFTER protect_from_forgery!
  skip_before_filter :verify_authenticity_token, :only => :webhook
  include TeleNotify::Controller

  #other code...
end
```

Last but not least, add a callback URL for Telegram in ```config/routes.rb```, which must be the same as your token.

```ruby
#config/routes.rb
Rails.application.routes.draw do
  post '/<your token>' => 'application#webhook'
end
```

Now that everything is done, you can finally run ```rake db:migrate```. Congratulations! Yout successfully installed TeleNotify!

## Using TeleNotify

To give users the ability to sign up for your Telegram Notifications, put a link to your telegram bot somewhere in your app. This can be as simple as

```html
<a href="https://telegram.me/YOUR_BOT_USERNAME">Send us a message to receive Push Notifications via Telegram!"</a>
```

Any user that sends a message to your bot will be stored in the database with their telegram_id and their first_name.

Send messages to those users like this: (e.g. from some controller in your app)

```ruby
#in some controller action

#sends message to a user
TeleNotify::TelegramUser.find(1).send_message("How Obama won the internet: Read more at http://example.com")

#finds a user by his Telegram ID and sends him a message
TeleNotify::TelegramUser.find_by(telegram_id: 12345678).send_message("Some other notification")

#sends a message to everyone who signed up
TeleNotify::TelegramUser.send_message_to_all("Check out our new stuff!")

```

## Testing

All testing is currently here: [TeleTest repository](https://github.com/ppati000/TeleTest/)

## Changes

0.1

  * Initial release

## Contributing

  Fork it. Commit your changes. Make a pull request :)

## License

TeleNotify was initially forked from [Acts as votable](https://github.com/ryanto/acts_as_votable) by ryanto. It is released under the [MIT
License](http://www.opensource.org/licenses/MIT).