Squirrelbot

Squirrelbot is a Telegram bot that saves links that you send it for viewing later. Currently, it only saves Youtube videos and formats them for easy viewing in Kodi. On the roadmap are handling videos from other websites and saving arbitrary links in a personal RSS feed.

Building

Squirrelbot is written in Go. You'll need the Go toolchain to build the bot.

Dependencies

youtube-dl is a runtime dependency. You should be able to install it through your system package manager.

Build

To build squirrelbot, simply run make in the root directory. To install squirrelbot, run make install as root.

Some build options are available as make variables. You can change the system config file location, systemd unit file location, and others. Look at the Makefile for details.

Running

Telegram Token

To run this bot, you first need to get an API token from Telegram. The directions for doing that are here.

Once you have your API token, run Squirrelbot with the required command-line arguments:

squirrelbot --address=http://myserver.example.com --port=80 \
  --token=<your Telegram token>

Ports

I use a reverse proxy to forward traffic from port 443 to Squirrelbot's default port. You can also set up Squirrelbot directly on port 80 or 443. Just make sure to use the appropriate port for your url scheme:

• Port 80 for http://
• Port 443 for https://

Download Directory

You can optionally specify a directory to download the videos to with the --dir argument:

squirrelbot --address=http://myserver.example.com --port=80 \
  --token=<your Telegram token> --dir="Youtube Videos"

MOTD

If you want Squirrelbot to respond to "/start" messages (which is a commonly used phrase for starting conversations with Telegram bots), you should set the motd (message of the day) flag:

squirrelbot --address=http://myserver.example.com --port=80 \
  --token=<your Telegram token> --motd="Hello! Try sending me a link."

Configuration with a YAML file

All command line options can also be set in a YAML config file (command line options override config file options). By default, Squirrelbot looks for the config file at /etc/squirrelbot/config.yaml

Here is an example config file:

address: https://myserver.example.com
port: 80
token: <your Telegram token>
directory: Youtube Videos
motd: Hello! Try sending me a link.

Tips

Transfering Video Files

Squirrelbot downloads videos to a local directory that can be specified with the --dir option. The videos are formatted to be easy to view in Kodi. If you run this bot on a different server than your Kodi/media server, you will want to transfer your video files to your Kodi or media server box. Here are a couple ways to do that.

Sync with rsync

• On the receiving end, set up an rsync daemon that allows write-only access to the right directory.
• On the sending end, write a simple script that uses inotifywait to copy files via rsync.
• Optionally, after the file is successfully send, the script should delete the file from the server.

Sync with Syncthing

You can use Syncthing to send video files to their final destination. See https://docs.syncthing.net/intro/getting-started.html for instructions.

License

Copyright © 2017-2018 Jordan Christiansen.

Squirrelbot is distributed under the terms of the GNU GPL version 3 or later. This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it. There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.

The full text of the GPL version 3 is in the file LICENSE. For more information, visit http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html.