thornode-telegram-bot ⚡🤖

A telegram bot to monitor the status of THORNodes.

Requirements

• Telegram

• Docker (if you want to run with docker or docker-compose)

• Docker Compose (if you want to run with docker-compose)

• Python3 (if you want to run without docker)

Quickstart

Open variables.env file and set

• TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN to your Telegram Bot Token obtained from BotFather.

• THORCHAIN_NODE_IP to any THORNode IP you want to monitor (or localhost). Leave it empty or remove it to use testnet seed Node IPs.

• BINANCE_NODE_IP to any Binance Node IP you want to monitor (or localhost). Leave it empty or remove it to not monitor a Binance Node.

• ADMIN_USER_IDS to a list of Telegram User IDs that are permissioned to access the Admin Area.

Install docker and docker-compose and run:

docker-compose up -d

Steps to run everything yourself

​Install dependencies​

Install all required dependencies via: pip install -r requirements.txt

​Create Telegram bot token via BotFather​

Start a Telegram chat with BotFather and click start.

Then send /newbot in the chat, and follow the given steps to create a new telegram token. Save this token, you will need it in a second.

​Set environment variables​

Set the telegram bot token you just created as an environment variable: TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN

export TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN=XXX

Next you can specify the IP of the Thornode that you want to watch in the THORCHAIN_NODE_IP environment variable.

Set it to localhost to listen a node on your own machine.

Leave this environment variable empty or don't even set it to use IPs of the testnet seed nodes from https://testnet-seed.thorchain.info.

export THORCHAIN_NODE_IP=3.228.22.197

If you have a Binance Node IP that you want to monitor, you can set BINANCE_NODE_IP to this IP. Set it to localhost if the Binance Node runs on the same machine as the Telegram Bot.

Leave this environment variable empty or don't even set it to not do any Binance Node monitoring.

export BINANCE_NODE_IP=3.228.22.197

Next set Telegram User IDs that are permissioned to access the Admin Area in the ADMIN_USER_IDS environment variable. Leave the default dummy values if you do not intend to use the Admin Area.

To find out your Telegram, open your Telegram Client, and search for the Telegram Bot @userinfobot. Ensure that this is a Bot and not a Channel and has exactly the handle @userinfobot, as there are a lot of channels and bots with similar names. Start this Bot and it returns you your User ID that you need to export in ADMIN_USER_IDS.

If you enter multiple User IDs, make sure to separate the IDs with , i.e. a comma.

export ADMIN_USER_IDS=12345,56789,42424

Finally, if you want test the Thornode Telegram Bot with data from your local machine, you need to set the debug environment variable:

export DEBUG=True

The DEBUG flag set to True will run a local web server as a separate process. This way the telegram bot can access the local files nodeaccounts.json und status.json in the test/ folder.

To test whether the bot actually notifies you about changes, the data the bot is querying needs to change. You can simulate that by manually editing test/nodeaccounts.json, test/status.json and test/midgard.json.

Furthermore in DEBUG mode a separate process runs increase_block_height.py which artificially increases the block height so that there are no notifications that the block height got stuck.

If you are using a Jetbrains IDE (e.g. Pycharm), you can set these environment variables for your run configuration which is very convenient for development (see: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/42708389/how-to-set-environment-variables-in-pycharm).

​Start the bot​

Start the bot via:

python3 thornode_bot.py

Make sure that you see a message in the console which indicates that the bot is running.

​Run and test the bot​

When you created the telegram bot token via BotFather, you gave your bot a certain name (e.g. thornode_bot). Now search for this name in Telegram, open the chat and hit start!

At this point, you can play with the bot, see what it does and check that everything works fine!

The bot persistents all data, which means it stores its chat data in the file storage/session.data. Once you stop and restart the bot, everything should continue as if the bot was never stopped.

If you want to reset your bot's data, simply delete the file session.data in the storage directory before startup.

​Production​

In production you do not want to use mock data from the local endpoint but real network data. To get real data just set DEBUG=False and all other environment variables as described in the 'Set environment variables' section. If you're using docker-compose to run this Bot, modify the existing variables in variables.env file (No need to set DEBUG as there's no DEBUG mode in the docker version).

​Docker Standalone​

To run the bot as a docker container, make sure you have docker installed (see: https://docs.docker.com/get-docker).

Navigate to the root directory of this repository and execute the following commands:

Build the docker image as described in the Dockerfile:

docker build -t thornode-bot .

To make the bot's data persistent, you need to create a docker volume. If the bot crashes or restarts the volume won't be affected and keeps all the session data:

docker volume create thornode-bot-volume

Finally run the docker container:

docker run --env TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN=XXX --env THORCHAIN_NODE_IP=XXX --env BINANCE_NODE_IP=XXX -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock --mount source=thornode-bot-volume,target=/storage thornode-bot

Set the --env TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN flag to your telegram bot token.

Set the --env THORCHAIN_NODE_IP flag to an IP of a running THORNode, or to localhost if the THORNode runs on the same machine as the Telegram Bot. If you don't know any IP leave this empty i.e. --env THORCHAIN_NODE_IP= or remove it completely - then the Telegram Bot works with testnet seed node IPs from https://testnet-seed.thorchain.info.

Set the --env BINANCE_NODE_IP flag to an IP of a running Binance Node, or to localhost if Telegram Bot and Binance Node run on the same machine. Leave this empty i.e. --env BINANCE_NODE_IP= or remove it to not do any Binance monitoring.

The -v argument passes the dockersocket to the container so that we can restart docker containers from inside the Telegram Bot.

Finally, the --mount flag tells docker to mount our previously created volume in the directory storage. This is the directory where your bot saves and retrieves the session.data file.

Healthcheck

There is a health check in the Dockerfile that runs the healthcheck.py file. The script assures that thornode_bot.py is periodically updating the health.check file.

If the docker health check fails, the docker container is marked as "unhealthy". However, when using docker standalone (without docker compose or docker swarm) this doesn't do anything. To restart unhealthy containers, we have to use the autoheal image https://hub.docker.com/r/willfarrell/autoheal/ .

To make sure a potentially unhealthy thorbot_node container is restarted, run the autoheal container alongside the thornode_bot container:

docker run -d --name autoheal --restart=always -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock willfarrell/autoheal

​Docker Compose​

The explained steps in the Docker Standalone section are conveniently bundled into a docker-compose.yaml file.

First, as before, you need to set the right values in the variables.env file for TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN,THORCHAIN_NODE_IP, BINANCE_NODE_IP and ADMIN_USER_IDS

If you don't want to spin up the official docker image from our dockerhub, open docker-compose.yaml and comment out the line image: "block42blockchaincompany/thornode_bot:latest" and comment in the line build: ..

Finally, start the Thornode Telegram Bot with:

docker-compose up -d

If you have problems running 'docker-compose up' while using a VPN, try to this:

• First run in your console

docker network create vpnworkaround --subnet 10.0.1.0/24

• Then comment in the networks configuration in docker-compose.yaml

networks:
  default:
    external:
      name: vpnworkaround

• Run again in your terminal

docker-compose up -d

This solution is taken from https://github.com/docker/for-linux/issues/418#issuecomment-491323611​

​Testing​

To test the Thornode Bot, you need to impersonate your own Telegram Client programmatically.

To do that, you need to obtain your API ID and API hash by creating a telegram application that uses your user identity on https://my.telegram.org . Simply login in with your phone number that is registered on telegram, then choose any application (we chose Android) and follow the steps.

Once you get access to api_id and api_hash, save them in the Environment variables TELEGRAM_API_ID and TELEGRAM_API_HASH respectively. Also save the name of your Telegram Bot without the preceding @ in the TELEGRAM_BOT_ID environment variable (e.g. if your bot is named @thornode_test_bot, save thornode_test_bot in TELEGRAM_BOT_ID).

You also need to have set the TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN environment variable with your telegram bot token, set ADMIN_USER_IDS with permissioned IDs and set DEBUG=True as explained in previous sections. If you want to test the restarting of docker containers, do not forget to start at least one container on your system.

Keep in mind that the test always deletes the session.data file inside storage/ in order to have fresh starts for every integration test. If you wish to keep your persistent data, don't run the integration test or comment out the line os.remove("../storage/session.data") in integration_test.py

To run the test open the test/ folder in your terminal and run

python3 integration_test.py

The test should endure several minutes. Every command succeded if you see -----ALL TESTS PASSED----- at the end.