New plugin for Telegram

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There is a new plugin available called pimatic-telegram. The plugin provides a device which processes commands send from the messaging client, and it provides a rule action send <type> telegram to [recipient list] "message content", as well as a rule predicate when telegram received "message", which can be used to trigger actions in the rule system

The plugin requires an apiToken for a Telegram bot you need to create, and the Chat ID for the recipient of the telegram messages. Instructions and more details on possibilities can be found on the plugin page.

Source can be found on GitHub: https://github.com/SenTzu01/pimatic-telegram/ . If you encounter any issues, or have a feature request I would appreciate you posting them there, to allow for tracking and planning. Of course the forum can be used to discuss enhancements in the appropriate section.

Enjoy !

thx for your work Dan! I just replied to your email.
now some users need to beta test your new plugin!
so go ahead guys!

I also placed some links at the forum to this thread and gonna promote it on facebook soon

Really nice! Was hoping someone with more codingskills could make this!!

Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to work on my system…

Installed and configured the plugin but when i want to create a new rule the “send message” option doesn’t pop-up in the actionscreen…

Could it be my previous setup (already was using this in combo with an Python script so TELEPOT is installed) could be giving headaches??

@mwittig maybe you can have a quick peak at the plugin code just for review?

@Stokstaart Could you send me some more detail on your environment so I can try to see what is causing this?

If the action is not available in the rule gui, I am thinking the plugin did not load correctly for some reason.
As a first it could help to to start Pimatic in the shell (not daemonized, and look at the output to see if any errors are logged relating to pimatic-telegram.

@Dan just shoot me, after a manual reboot i get the popup and initial testing gives me messages on my Telegram account. Looks like i didn’t restart after installing the plugin ( yes i am ashamed now) …

EDIT
Additional i just love the way it is also capable of sending variables out of the box!!

@Stokstaart Excellent! Glad you got it working . Yes variables can be used in the messages, but those kudos belong with the Pimatic core team

@leader21 said in New plugin for Telegram:

maybe you can have a quick peak at the plugin code just for review?

Everything works as expected for me. The only hickup I had was a typo in the API token (my fault, of course). The resulting “Unauthorized” error is shown in a toast message and prompted once to the log as I’d expect this. The source code is excellent. Well done, @Dan

Nice plugin!
Is it possible to receive messages with this plugin as well? So you can send messages to it, which can start an action/rule?

Hello. Thanks for the plugin.
It is possible to send a file (image or video) with this plugin?
Would ease the rules.

@Andi-Tudor and @rikki78 Many thanks for your suggestions, nice to see more people are picking up on the plugin.

@Andi-Tudor I think this can be done relatively easily, I’ll look into extending the rules.
@rikki78 Receiving messages and executing actions based on bot commands is somewhat more complicated, but definitely not impossible. This will take me more time, and may require changing the way the plugin interfaces with the Telegram API as well as exposing a device in Pimatic.

Dan

Thanks for this plugin.

One thing is not clear to me. You work with a fixed userChatId?
With my current python script I send messages to 3 persons: myself, my wife and (occasionally) my son using 3 different chat id’s (of course).
Is that possible with your plugin?
Or is this now a “feature request” for a variable chatid?

@Harry-van-der-Wolf said in New plugin for Telegram:

Thanks for this plugin.

One thing is not clear to me. You work with a fixed userChatId?
With my current python script I send messages to 3 persons: myself, my wife and (occasionally) my son using 3 different chat id’s (of course).
Is that possible with your plugin?
Or is this now a “feature request” for a variable chatid?

Hi @Harry, good point. As I was developing the first cut with my own usage scenario in mind, I only thought of a single recipient. Currently I am testing a version where you can add multiple recipients, which should accommodate your needs better!

The new version might need some reconfiguration of recipients by the user though (remove the “single chatID” entry from config.json, and add the chatID’s as a list item.

Dan

Gents,

I have just uploaded v1.02, which includes multiple recipient support via the plugin configuration page
Important for people upgrading from the previous version:
As indicated previously, you will need to copy your userChatId on the plugin configuration page to a newly created list item, else you will see a failure.

• You can then also add additional chatIds to the recipient list
• Do not forget to restart Pimatic after the upgrade, and once more after making changes to the recipient list

I will continue to implement the request for sending other media for the next release

Dan

Furthermore, I have added an “enabled flag” so make sure to enable if you want people to actually receive messages

Hi,

Thanks for adding the multi-recipient option …,
but it is not entirely what I wanted. This will send the message to all recipients simultaneously. For this I could have used the group-id as well (if I have a group).

What I meant is to send the message to the users I want. I have different events. Two alarm events to be send to every user and a couple depending on the user like:

1. send telegram recipient1 recipient2 recipient3 "motion detected when nobody home"
   and/or
2. send telegram recipient1 "some message"
   and/or
3. send telegram recipient2 "some other message"

My python script simply parses the command line. The first is the script itself of course. The last is the message. “every string (space separated) in between” is 1 or more users.

So option 1 could also be your current option: No recipients mentioned => send to all.
Or combined: A send telegram x y z "message" would mean in this case:
“if” parameters provided before the last message parameter (#parameters > 1)
“then” send to provided recipients (#parameters 1 - (n-1) )
“else” send to all recipients

Is this possible for you to implement?

As always this Plugin doesn’t work for me. I do everything what tutorial say. API Key Chat ID and I set a rule for a message. Pimatic send message to all recipients. But no message will show up from my telegram bot… I don’t get any error that I can say on my side maybe all fine.

If you want to send commands to the bot is complicated cause my knowings about that is that you need a server with https connectivity and also a webhook.

Update: I tested my token and chat id via url string request and the bot send my text message from my browser. There after I copy and paste token and chat id again from browser url and edit Plugin settings. After reboot it doesn’t work again. No error will occur…

@Swen Is the plugin activated? You can check the plugin in the Plugins page of the GUI for that. Yesterday another user logged a similar issue on github and this seemed to be his issue in the end. If this doesnt work, contact me directly via chat, and we can see if this can be troubleshooted. When we find a solution it can then be posted in the forum.

Dan

@Dan, I’m very glad that you wrote this plugin. Unfortunately I’m having a little problem with sending messages, i.e. they got sent but do not arrive.

I created an own bot via BotMatser as described. When I now call https://api.telegram.org/bot<myKey>/getMe I get something like this: {“ok”:true,“result”:{“id”:111111111,“first_name”:“MyName”,“username”:“MyName_bot”}}.

In the config I stored
{
“plugin”: “telegram”,
“host”: “api.telegram.org”,
“apiToken”: “<myKey>”,
“userChatId”: “111111111”,
“recipients”: []
}

Is that correct? I also tried with the other numbers, the first part of apiToken, the updateId etc. I do not see an error in pimatic’s log but I do not receive any telegram message.
The rule is “when pimatic-start” or a sspecific time.

Any help highly appreciated. and many thanks for your effort!

@argitto Glad I can contribute to the community !

See my post earlier on the change since the last version. You need to move userChatId to the list in the plugin config page, or directly in config.json:
{
“plugin”: “telegram”,
“active”: true,
“apiToken”: “xxxxxx”
“recipients”: [
{
“name”: “FriendlyName”,
“userChatId”: “nnnnnnn”
}

Then restart pimatic, think it would work then. If not, contact me directly and we will try to sort it.

Cheers,

Dan