Group Butler

Short introduction

This bot has been created to help people administrate their groups, and includes many useful tools.

Group Butler was born as an otouto v3.1 (@mokubot), but it has been turned into an administration bot.

Group Butler on Telegram:

• @GroupButler_bot

  • branch: production
  • channel: @GroupButler_ch.

• @GBReborn_bot

  • branch: staging
  • channel: @GroupButler_beta.

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Setup

First of all, take a look at your bot settings

• Make sure privacy is disabled (more info can be found by heading to the official Bots FAQ page). Send /setprivacy to @BotFather to check the current status of this setting.

Create a plain text file named .env with the following:

• Set TG_TOKEN to the authentication token that you received from @BotFather.

• Set SUPERADMINS as a JSON array containing your numerical Telegram ID. Other superadmins can be added too. It is important that you insert the numerical ID and NOT a string.

• Set LOG_CHAT (the ID of the chat where the bot will send all the bad requests received from Telegram) and your LOG_ADMIN (the ID of the user that will receive execution errors).

Your .env file should now look somewhat like this:

TG_TOKEN=123456789:ABCDefGhw3gUmZOq36-D_46_AMwGBsfefbcQ
SUPERADMINS=[12345678]
LOG_CHAT=12345678
LOG_ADMIN=12345678

Setup (using Docker)

Requirements:

• docker 17.06.0-ce
• docker-compose 1.14.0
• Optional: Docker Swarm cluster for deployment
• Optional: GitLab repository for CI/CD

Running (dev mode)

Run docker-compose up. Docker will pull and build the required images, so the first time you run this command should take a little while. After that, the bot should be up and running.

Code is mounted on the bot container, so you can make changes and restart the bot as you normally would. There’s no need to use docker-compose up --build or docker-compose build unless you changed something on Dockerfile.

Redis default port is mounted to host, just in case you want to debug something using tools available at the host.

The redis container is set to not persist data while in dev mode.

Running (production mode)

There’s a number of ways you can use docker for deploying into production.

Files named docker-compose.*.yml are gitignored, just in case you feel the need to override docker-compose.yml or write something else entirely. docker-compose.override.yml is used to store dev mode overrides since it’s read by default by docker-compose.

The bot also supports reading Docker Secrets (may work with other vaults too). Check lua/config.lua to see which variables can be read from secrets.

Compose Example

You would need to write another override file (i.e. docker-compose.deploy.yml) matching your needs (change restart policy to always, either add groupbutler to an external network or create a redis service with persistency, etc.).

You could deploy Group Butler by running something like this:

docker-compose -f docker-compose.yml -f docker-compose.deploy.yml up

Swarm Example

Assuming you have deployed redis into staging (docker stack deploy … or docker service create …) and exported the required environment variables (like $TG_TOKEN…), you could deploy Group Butler by running:

docker stack deploy staging -c docker-compose.yml

GitLab CI Example (uses swarm)

• Clone this repo to a GitLab server (could be gitlab.com or self hosted)
• Set Project Variables, paying attention to variable scope: the .gitlab-ci.yml bundled with this repo supports two environments: staging and production
• Disable shared runners and install GitLab CI runner on at least one of the manager nodes. Make sure to tag them as manager too
• Deploy (manually or using another repository) redis to staging and/or production
• Push to staging and/or production branches
• If everything went well, your very own Group Butler should be up and running

Setup (without using Docker)

List of required packages:

• libreadline-dev
• redis-server
• lua5.1
• liblua5.1dev
• libssl-dev
• git
• make
• unzip
• curl
• libcurl4-gnutls-dev

You will need some other Lua modules too, which can be (and should be) installed through the Lua package manager LuaRocks.

Installation

You can easily install Group Butler by running the following commands:

# Tested on Ubuntu 16.04

$ wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/group-butler/GroupButler/master/install.sh
$ bash install.sh

or

# Tested on Ubuntu 14.04, 15.04 and 16.04, Debian 7, Linux Mint 17.2

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get upgrade
$ sudo apt-get install libreadline-dev libssl-dev lua5.1 liblua5.1-dev git make unzip redis-server curl libcurl4-gnutls-dev

# We are going now to install LuaRocks and the required Lua modules

$ wget http://luarocks.org/releases/luarocks-2.2.2.tar.gz
$ tar zxpf luarocks-2.2.2.tar.gz
$ cd luarocks-2.2.2
$ ./configure; sudo make bootstrap
$ sudo luarocks install luasec
$ sudo luarocks install luasocket
$ sudo luarocks install redis-lua
$ sudo luarocks install lua-term
$ sudo luarocks install serpent
$ sudo luarocks install lua-cjson
$ sudo luarocks install Lua-cURL
$ cd ..

# Clone the repository and give the launch script permissions to be executed
# If you want to clone the beta branch, use git clone with the [-b beta] option

$ git clone https://github.com/group-butler/GroupButler.git
$ cd GroupButler
$ sudo chmod +x launch.sh

Before you start the bot, you have to start the Redis process.

# Start Redis

$ sudo service redis-server start

Starting the process

To start the bot, run ./launch.sh. To stop the bot, press Control CTRL+C twice.

You may also start the bot with ./polling.lua, however it will not restart automatically. You will also need to find another way to export the required environment variables.

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Something that you should known before run the bot

• You can change some settings of the bot. All the settings are placed in config.lua, in the bot_settings table
  • cache_time.adminlist: the permanence in seconds of the adminlist in the cache. The bot caches the adminlist to avoid to hit Telegram limits
  • notify_bug: if true, the bot will send a message that notifies that a bug has occurred to the current user, when a plugin is executed and an error happens
  • log_api_errors: if true, the bot will send in the LOG_CHAT all the relevant errors returned by an api request toward Telegram
  • stream_commands: if true, when an update triggers a plugin, the match will be printed on the console
• There are some other useful fields that can be added to .env you can find in config.lua, for instance
  • REDIS_DB: the selected Redis database (if you are running Redis with the default config, the available databases are 16). The database will be selected on each start/reload. Default: 0
• Other things that may be useful
  • Administrators commands start for $. They are not documented, look at the triggers of plugins/admin.lua plugin for the whole list
  • If the main function of a plugin returns true, the bot will continue to try to match the message text with the missing triggers of the plugins table
  • You can send yourself a backup of the zipped bot folder with the $backup command
  • The Telegram Bot API has some undocumented "weird behaviours" that you may notice while using this bot
    • In supergroups, the kickChatMember method returns always a positive response if the user_id has been part of the group at least once, it doesn't matter if the user is not in the group when you use this method
    • In supergroups, the unbanChatMember method returns always a positive response if the user_id has been part of the group at least once, it doesn't matter if the user is not in the group or is not in the group blacklist

Some notes about the database

Everything is stored on Redis, and the fastest way to edit your database is via the Redis CLI.

You can find a backup of your Redis database in /etc/redis/dump.rdb. The name of this file and the frequency of saves are dependent on your redis configuration file.

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Translators

If you want to help translate the bot, follow the instructions below. Parts of Group Butler use tools from gettext. However we don't use binary format *.mo for the sake of simplicity. The bot parses the *.po files in the locales directory at runtime.

We recommend contributing translations to our Crowdin project.

Note for developers: update the POT file whenever you change a string, and don't forget to use the i18n() function so it's translatable. In order to update the POT file you will need to install gettext and then run:

make pot

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Credits

Topkecleon, for the original otouto

Iman Daneshi and Tiago Danin, for Jack-telegram-bot

Cosmonawt, for his Lua library for the Bot API

Yago Pérez for his telegram-bot

The Werewolf guys, for aiding the spread of the bot

Lucas Montuano, for helping me a lot in the debugging of the bot

All the Admins of our discussion groups about Group Butler

All the people who reported bugs and suggested new stuff

Le Laide