weather-bot

Simple telegram weather bot with NodeJS. Bot can give current weather for a given location and manage subscriptions for users to be alerted everyday with weather prediction.

Requirements

• Create a bot and get your bot token. More info in Telegram web.
• Register for free and get your token in OpenWeatherMap.
• Tested on node 7.10.0.

Installation

Edit the following info in config.js.

• Place your telegram bot token in TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN.
• Put your openweather token in OPENWEATHER_TOKEN.
• Set the absolut path for sqlite database file in SQLITE_DB_PATH.
• Install sqlite3 (if it is not present) on your OS.

Download dependencies and run in NodeJS:

npm install   
node index.js    

sqlite3 installation

Windows

• Go to SQLite download page and download precompiled binaries for Windows (I choosed a bundle of command-line tools for managing SQLite database files, including the command-line shell program, the sqldiff.exe program, and the sqlite3_analyzer.exe program.).
• Create a folder C:\>sqlite or whatever you want and unzip the files inside it ( or just place the file in a folder already in your PATH).
• Add C:\>sqlite in your PATH environment variable.
• Go to terminal and type sqlite3, you should see SQLite version number.

Linux

First option, the easiest, but probably official repositories will not have the last version:

• Open terminal and type sudo apt-get install sqlite3

Second option:

• Go to SQLite download page and download sqlite-autoconf-*.tar.gz from source code section.
• Run the following code.

  tar xvfz sqlite-autoconf-3190300.tar.gz
  cd sqlite-autoconf-3190300
  ./configure --prefix = /usr/local
  make
  make install
  

Mac OS X

• Same procedure than for Linux if sqlite3 is not installed already.

Considerations

This bot was made just for fun, I just did it to learn basics of Telegram bot API. I have it running on my Raspberry Pi. If you use this bot and it gets so popular that many people use it, please consider limitations of the API.

From Telegram web.

My bot is hitting limits, how do I avoid this?

When sending messages inside a particular chat, avoid sending more than one message per second. We may allow short bursts that go over this limit, but eventually you'll begin receiving 429 errors.

If you're sending bulk notifications to multiple users, the API will not allow more than 30 messages per second or so. Consider spreading out notifications over large intervals of 8—12 hours for best results.

Also note that your bot will not be able to send more than 20 messages per minute to the same group.

How can I message all of my bot's subscribers at once?

Unfortunately, at this moment we don't have methods for sending bulk messages, e.g. notifications. We may add something along these lines in the future.

In order to avoid hitting our limits when sending out mass notifications, consider spreading them over longer intervals, e.g. 8-12 hours. The API will not allow more than ~30 messages to different users per second, if you go over that, you'll start getting 429 errors.

From OpenWeatherMap web, free plan allows 60 calls per minute.