TLG_JoinCaptchaBot/docker

Docker configuration

This document lists the requirements and steps to run TLG_JoinCaptchaBot in a docker container.

Pre-requisites

• docker. If possible, install it using your OS native packaging system (under Debian based systems, use apt-get install docker-ce).

• GNU Make, which should be installed on most Linux distributions by default.

Building a new image

Create a new bot on Telegram using The BotFather. Make sure your bot can be invited to groups and has privacy set to disabled. Without this, the bot won't be able to read messages on the group.

Save the bot token. The token should not publicly visible as anyone with it could take control of your bot instance. We'll use the token to create the docker image containing the bot (below).

Create the docker image:

make

The build process may take a while, depending on your computer and connection speeds. Docker will indicate a successful build at the end of the process with something like:

Successfully built (number)
Successfully tagged captcha-bot:latest

Running

To run an instance, use the next command placing your Bot token to pass it as an enviroment variable:

docker run -d --name captcha-bot --env CAPTCHABOT_TOKEN="XXXXXXXXX:XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX" --restart always captcha-bot

This will start the container in the background. Use docker ps to check if the container is up and running, and docker logs captcha-bot to investigate the logs.

You can also run with other environment variable. For list available environment variables, please check src/settings.py.

Note on Token security: A little bit of paranoia never hurts! Once your container has been built, remove the lines from your bash history containing your token. This can be accomplished with the history -d command on individual lines. An easier (but coarser) approach is to run history -c, followed by history -r. This will clear the history buffer and re-read the history from disk.

Stopping the bot

To stop the bot, use

docker stop captcha-bot
docker rm captcha-bot