telegram-send 0.4.2

Send messages and files over Telegram from the command-line.

telegram-send

Telegram-send is a command-line tool to send messages and files over Telegram to your account or to a channel. It provides a simple interface that can be easily called from other programs.

Table of Contents

• Usage

• Install

• Examples

  • alert on completion of shell commands

  • periodic messages with cron

• Uninstall

Usage

To send a message:

telegram-send "hello, world"

To send a file:

telegram-send --file document.pdf

To send an image with an optional caption:

telegram-send --image photo.jpg --caption "The Moon at night"

Install

Install telegram-send system-wide with pip:

sudo pip3 install telegram-send

Or if you want to install it for a single user:

pip3 install telegram-send

If installed for a single user you need to add ~/.local/bin to their path:

echo 'PATH="$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bashrc

And finally configure it with telegram-send --configure if you want to send to your account, or with telegram-send --configure-channel to send to a channel.

Use the --config option to use multiple configurations. For example to set up sending to a channel in a non-default configuration: telegram-send --config channel.conf --configure-channel. Then always specify the config file to use it: telegram-send --config channel.conf "hello".

Examples

Here are some examples to get a taste of what is possible with telegram-send.

alert on completion of shell commands

Receive an alert when long-running commands finish with the tg alias, based on Ubuntu’s built-in alert. Put the following in your ~/.bashrc:

alias tg='telegram-send "$([ $? = 0 ] && echo "" || echo "error: ") $(history|tail -n1|sed -e '\''s/^\s*[0-9]\+\s*//;s/[;&|]\s*tg$//'\'')"'

And then use it like sleep 10: tg.

periodic messages with cron

We can combine telegram-send with cron to periodically send messages. Here we will set up a cron job to send the Astronomy Picture of the Day to the astropod channel.

Create a bot by talking to the BotFather, create a public channel and add your bot as administrator to the channel. You will need to explicitly search for your bot’s username when adding it. Then run telegram-send --configure-channel --config astropod.conf. We will use the apod.py script that gets the daily picture and calls telegram-send to post it to the channel.

We create a cron job /etc/cron.d/astropod with the content:

SHELL=/bin/sh
PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin

# m h dom mon dow user  command
0 1 * * * telegram ~/apod.py --config ~/astropod.conf

Make sure the file ends with a newline. Cron will then execute the script every day at 1:00 as the user telegram. Join the astropod channel to see the result.

Uninstall

sudo pip3 uninstall telegram-send
sudo rm /etc/telegram-send.conf

Or if you installed it for a single user:

pip3 uninstall telegram-send
rm ~/.config/telegram-send.conf