TTYgram

A simple but yet effective terminal Telegram bot.

Why?

I just wanted to monitor my server temperature and basic statistics from Telegram but I ended up overengineering the initial idea. I though it would be useful and cool being able to execute commands and scripts remotely as well.

Although being far from a completely functional shell I find it quite useful!

Specs and how it works

Execute commands

Theoretically any command can be executed, but with some restrictions. Commands are executed in a sandboxed process using subprocess python module. Commands are thrown to standard sh shell and once they have been executed, the process exits. Some made workarounds:

Some commands may output a large text to stdout, in this case, since Telegram API has a max length message restriction, a warning message is displayed. Also, some commands like ping google.com may never exit. Launched subprocess has been configured with a timeout of 2 seconds to avoid locks in situations like this since command output can only be readen once it has exited.

Some additional tweaks may need to be done in order to match your requirements.

Change dir

As I have mentioned, since commands are launched in a temporary shell which exits after execution, some commands like cd won't work. For this reason this feature has been implemented as an option: chdir. It uses os.chdir(path) which will change parent's current work directory.

Monitor your system status

⚠️ This has only been tested in Ubuntu Server and this option is only available for Linux systems.

Chat Id

Get your chat id for authentication purposes. Read bellow.

Usage

1. Register

Register a new bot with BotFather bot in Telegram. Copy TOKEN.

2. Add token

    export TTYGRAM_TOKEN='your_token'

3. Start bot

    cd ttygram && python3 bot/main.py

3. Authenticate

Since Telegram bots are public once published and you may not want anybody poking around in your system, a simle and stupid "authentication" method has been added. Because Telegram chats have a unique id, we will use this id to enable conversations only between your bot and you and nobody else.

So open your bot, select chat_id option in bot, get your conversation id and export it:

    export TTYGRAM_CHAT_ID='your_chat_id'

Dependencies

This project has been built using python_telegram_bot. Follow their installation instructinos.

Also, you may have to install Python3

Support

If you find any issue I suggest that you open a PR with the fix 🙂