Bookmarks Telegram bot

Small Telegram bot for saving bookmarks, designed for personal self-hosting on a home server or VPS.

A simple way to keep track of interesting links without relying on browser bookmarks.

I built this to solve a personal problem — I accumulate a lot of information but struggle to keep it organized. This is an attempt to gather scattered links into one place.

What does it do?

This bot listens for your messages in Telegram and saves the URLs in them in a text file you must specify. It comes with a server that will process the text file, build an HTML, and serve it.

The cron is running frequently in my server. Checks for updates in the GitHub repository, and if there are any, it runs the test, pass the linter (Prettier would be the only dependency, and arguably could be just managed in the development phase but meh I was having a blast doing this part).

Wishlist

• Restart the systemd services if npm tasks are successfull (I forgot oops)
• Fetch OpenGraph information thyself! I don't want to be rate limited by an external service!
• Better placeholder if the OpenGraph image for the link can't be fetched or whatever other reason

Installation

As mentioned, I host this myself by managing the Go and the Node services separately using systemd in my VPS server. You do you! If you want to go down the same path as me:

Requirements

• A Telegram bot token (get one from @BotFather)
• An environment file with your secrets (example included)
• Go toolchain (if building from source)

Clone the repo

git clone https://github.com/iagus/bookmarks-telegram-bot.git
cd bookmarks-telegram-bot

Create your secrets.env and fill the info:

cp secrets.example.env secrets.env

Build Go

go run main.go

Start the Node server

cd server
npm run start

Deploy

Depends on what route you go. If, like me, you're in for systemd, I recommend modifying the cron.sh file to your liking and adding it to your crontab. Then you'll need two separate systemd services- one for the Go process, and another for Node's. Remember to enable them once created. Logs are accessible in (and followable) in nice format by running journalctl -fu <service name> -o cat.

There are examples of the service files. Watch out with the ownership and file permissions- make sure your user can execute them:

Go

[Unit]
Description=Bookmarks Telegram Bot service
After=network.target

[Service]
EnvironmentFile=path/to/your/env/file
ExecStart=/path/to/compiled/go/binary
WorkingDirectory=/path/to/cloned/repo
Restart=no <- you choose
User=your user

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Node

Remember that the node binary must be accessible for systemd.

[Unit]
Description=Bookmarks Telegram Bot writer Reader

[Service]
EnvironmentFile=path/to/your/env/file
ExecStart=/path/to/node /path/to/bookmarks.js
WorkingDirectory=/path/to/cloned/repo/server
Restart=on-failure <- you choose
User=your user

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Serving styles

I did not implement serving the styles from Node, since I have an nginx vhost up and running for this app server.

You can do the same, or modify the bookmarks.js script to handle the styles request. But if you're using nginx/apache, I'd recommend serving it from there.