cli2telegram

Small utility to send Telegram messages from the CLI.

This can f.ex. be used to

• quickly send arbitrary messages to a Telegram chat of your choice
• use it as a replacement for the "mail" program on linux
• use Telegram as a notification backend for the ZFS Event Daemon (zed)

Features

• Read messages from argument or STDIN
• (Optional) Configuration file
• Retry sending messages for a specified amount of time
• Handling of long messages
• Run as a daemon and echo messages into a linux pipe

Examples

cli2telegram -h

# From arguments
cli2telegram "This is a message"

cli2telegram "Header" "This is a multiline message."

# From STDIN
echo My Message | cli2telegram

printf "Header\nThis is a multiline message." | cli2telegram

# Config via parameters
printf "Message" | cli2telegram -b "123456789:ABCDEFG" -c "123456789"

# Config via parameters and send message in a code block
printf "Message" | cli2telegram -b "123456789:ABCDEFG" -c "123456789" -C

# as a Daemon
cli2telegram -d -p "/tmp/cli2telegram"
echo "hello world!" > /tmp/cli2telegram

Install

To use this utility install it either using:

pip install cli2telegram

or - if you don't want to install it globally - using f.ex. venv-install:

venv-install cli2telegram cli2telegram

or your custom venv manager of choice.

Configuration

To be able to send you messages you have to provide a bot token and a chat id. You can configure cli2telegram using cli parameters, a configuration file, environment variables, or a combination of them.

Parameters

File

cli2telegram uses container-app-conf so you can use YAML, TOML, or ENV to set those.

Have a look at the cli2telegram.toml_example file to get an idea.

Daemon

When running cli2telegram as a daemon, the pipe will close for a brief amount of time between receiving input messages. If you are sending multiple messages to the pipe using f.ex. a script, make sure to wait a bit (f.ex. 0.5 seconds) between sending messages, otherwise:

• multiple messages may be received as one
• messages may get lost
• you may receive a Broken pipe error

Use Cases

ZFS Event Daemon (ZED)

To make zed call cli2telegram we will trick it and make it use cli2telegram as an E-Mail client.

Edit /etc/zfs/zed.d/zed.rc as root:

sudo nano -w /etc/zfs/zed.d/zed.rc

and

• uncomment ZED_EMAIL_ADDR, the value does not matter since we use our own email script, but it is necessary to set a value to make ZED send 'emails'
• set ZED_EMAIL_PROG to the path of the script, f.ex. /usr/bin/cli2telegram
  • it is important to note that zed does not seem to work if your command needs arguments to run

# this must not be empty!
ZED_EMAIL_ADDR="root"

[...]

ZED_EMAIL_PROG="/usr/bin/cli2telegram"

[...]

# this must not be empty!
ZED_EMAIL_OPTS="#zfs #$(hostname)"

[...]

# If you want to receive email no matter the state of your pool, you’ll want to set:
ZED_NOTIFY_VERBOSE=1

[...]

Since zed will run your scripts as root, if you want to use a config file you have to put it in f.ex. /root/.config/cli2telegram.toml.

Contributing

GitHub is for social coding: if you want to write code, I encourage contributions through pull requests from forks of this repository. Create GitHub tickets for bugs and new features and comment on the ones that you are interested in.

License

cli2telegram by Markus Ressel
Copyright (C) 2018  Markus Ressel

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as
published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the
License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU Affero General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU Affero General Public License
along with this program.  If not, see <https://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.