This project was born out of an idea from my brother - he wanted something simple to gamify workouts with friends. Therefore, I developed this telegram bot to allow them to track their runs in a leaderboard. This bot groups leaderboards by telegram chats, and each individual chat would have its own leaderboard! This allows you to use this bot among multiple friend circles - each with their own leaderboards.
The instructions below assume you are using the bot I am hosting. If you decide to host the bot yourself, replace the bot you are adding to the group with your bot instead.
You can communicate directly with the bot if you only want to track your own runs privately. Simply start chatting with the telerun bot.
If you want to track runs for a chat group, add telerun to the chat group. Once done, it will immediately be ready for listening to commands.
This will display a basic help message, with the various commands supported by the bot and how to use them. To see this message, just type /help.
This will display a list of users who are in this group chat. To see this message, just type /show.
This adds a single run to be tracked by the bot. As an example, if I wanted to add that I ran 2.5km, I would enter /add 2.5. You will get a response from the bot that the run you entered is now tracked.
This command allows you to view the runs that you have added to this particular chat group. To do so, you must use the list command, together with the number of runs you want to see (in descending order). If you want to view your last 5 runs: /list 5. This is useful when used together with commands that edit run data, like edit or delete.
The edit command allows you to edit the distance ran for a particular run. The syntax of this command is: /edit <run_id> <run_distance>.
The delete command allows you to remove a run from being tracked. The syntax of this command is /delete <run_id>.
Finally, the /tally command displays the leaderboard.
Due to resource constraints, I encourage you to self-host this bot should you wish to do so! Its simple to get started, you simply need the Free tier on shuttle.rs. Shuttle will then provision the resources necessary to operate this bot.
After you have signed up for an account on shuttle, you will need to do the following:
# Install shuttle cli
cargo install cargo-shuttle
# Login
cargo shuttle login
# Initialise project
cargo shuttle init --no-frameworkYou can then proceed to clone the repository, making the necessary changes to Cargo.toml to reflect the correct meta-data of hosting your own bot service. You will then want to create a Secrets.toml file with the contents:
TELOXIDE_TOKEN = <TELEGRAM_BOT_API_TOKEN>TELEGRAM_BOT_API_TOKEN is the API key of the telegram bot you are creating. For instructions on how to do so, please follow this tutorial.
Viola! You have now hosted your own telerun bot service 🥳