stopstop

stopstop

simple telegram output passer

This is a module to simplify using Telegram's bot API as a simple DIY alternative to services like Pushover or Pushbullet. It's named after the way historical telegrams used STOP in place of periods.

var stopstop = require('stopstop');

• Making a bot and finding your chat id
  • Getting a telegram bot's api token
  • Getting your chat id
• Basic usage
  • stopstop(token[, chatId[, data[, ...]]])
  • stopstop(token, chatId, stopstop[, options])
• Curried functions
  • Chaining stopstop
• It's just like console.log!

Making a bot and finding your chat id

Before you can start using stopstop, you will need a Telegram bot and the chat ids of the chat you wish to have your bot notify.

Getting a telegram bot's api token

This part is easy. Just talk to BotFather and follow his directions for making a new bot. He'll give you an api key and you'll be good to go. If you already have a bot and you forgot its api token, BotFather can help you with that as well. Yay!

Getting your chat id

This is a little harder, and requires a bit of manual API work.

1. Send your Telegram bot a message. If you can't think of anything, /start actually counts as a message for this step, so you're probably already good to go.

2. Navigate to this url in your browser (an api request tester of your choice), replacing <token> with your bot's api token.

   https://api.telegram.org/bot<token>/getUpdates
   

3. If you're familiar with json, you'll find a couple objects containing your user details, including an id parameter. That's your chat id! If you're not familiar with json, just use your browser's search feature to search for your username, your name on Telegram, or even the message you sent your bot. Inside that tangle of brackets, you should be able to find a "id": some-number field that's pretty close to the rest of your user data. That's what you're looking for.

   "from": {
     "id": 123456789,
     "first_name": "Your",
     "last_name": "Name",
     "username": "your_username"
   }
   

Basic usage

stopstop takes three parameters: your bot's api token, your chat id, and whatever you wish to send. That last part sounds pretty vague, and that's because it is! After those first two required parameters, you can pass just about anything you would wannya pass to console.log to stopstop!

stopstop('<token>', 123456789, "Hi! I'm a debug message!");

stopstop(token[, chatId[, data[, ...]]])

Have the Telegram bot with your provided token send data to your specified chat id. Note that stopstop doesn't accept a callback, because your script doesn't actually get notified if it succeeded or not! Seeing that the whole point of this is to notify you, it just seems kinda redundant. You might also notice that nearly all of stopstop's parameters are optional in a really weird, nested way. That's because it's curried! If you're not sure what that means, keep reading~

• token string. Your bot's api token! Your messages will come from the bot this corresponds to.
• chatId number. This is where you specify who you want your bot to send messages to.
• data anything. Just think of this part as the arguments you would pass to console.log and you'll be fine!

stopstop(token, chatId, stopstop[, options])

You're probably wondering why I'm providing documentation for the same function twice, and why stopstop is being passed to itself. Since you can pass anything as data, I needed some way for you to signify that you wanted this version of stopstop! This function is also curried, which is why options is optional.

• options object. If you ever feel like you want a little more control of what your bot sends, this object allows you to specify what stopstop sends to Telegram! You'll wannya refer to Telegram's sendMessage reference to learn more about what you can provide in options. Don't worry about providing chat_id.

stopstop("<token>", 123456789, stopstop, {
    text: "Oh, I'm so *bold*~",
    parse_mode: 'markdown'
});

Curried functions

I said above that stopstop is curried, and you might be wondering what currying is. The idea is pretty simple: stopstop actually requires at least three parameters (while stopstop's second variation requires four). If you pass less than this number of parameters to stopstop, stopstop will return a new version of itself with these functions filled in!

stopme = stopstop("<token>", 123456789);
stopme("Hi! I'm a debug message!");

That's literally all there is to it! It allows you to define your api token and chat id once and never need to worry about it again!

Chaining stopstop

This isn't something curried functions usually do, but stopstop actually also returns itself even when you specify all the arguments! This lets you chain stopstop. Unfortunately, there aren't any guarantees that you'll receive these messages in order, so try to write them so that they don't sound weird if they arrive in a different order!

stopme = stopstop("<token>", 123456789, "Hi! I'm a debug message!");
stopme('I have so many things to say.')("Here's another message for you~");

It's just like console.log!

I really did mean it when I said that it's just like console.log, by the way! The only thing that you can't pass stopstop as data is stopstop itself.

stopme = stopstop("<token>", 123456789, "Hi! I'm a debug message!");

stopme('multiple', 'parameters!');
stopme(['arrays', 'too', '!']);
stopme({objects: 'and'}, ['arrays'], {both: ['at', 'once', '?!']});
stopme(function() {return 'When would you ever need to log a function?';});
stopme([stopstop, 'If you really HAD to send yourself stopstop.']);
stopme('Guessed it? stopstop uses %s on its parameters.', 'util.format');