tgchan2tw

tgchan2tw

Auto-forward Telegram channel posts to Twitter status

Used by myself for @myl7s on Telegram -> @myl107 on Twitter

Features

• Support images: Embed them into Twitter status
• Support replies: When you reply on Telegram, corresponding status will also reply to corresponding status if exists on Twitter
• Support forward message: Other than stubbornly copy the message body, use the original link as body to send to Twitter. When the original message does not have an url (like from a private channel or chat), use the url of your forward message.
• Support blockquote text: Feel free to use Ctrl+Shift+M to create fix-width/quoted text in your message
• Merge forward message and your comment: If you forward a message with your some words, Telegram will, surprisingly, create two messages, of which one contains the forward message, and the other contains your words. The app will merge the two into only one status and send it to Twitter.
• Split status if reaching Twitter length limit: While Telegram generously allow you to send so long message, Twitter status length limit is kinda annoying. The app will handle this, automatically and properly split a Telegram message into several Twitter statuses to fit the Twitter requirement.
  • What is more, the splitting will be done in a wise way, as the app will search spaces or punctuations (including Chinese full-width punctuations) to decide the splitting point.
• Exclude specific messages from forwarding by tags: Thanks to filterout param of RSSHub
• Retry: PollRange / PollInterval should be the total retry times
• Error report: Set SMTP and email to get notification when any forwarding failed

Feel free to raise new feature request using "Issue" panel!

Deploy

The app requires a RSSHub server to get structural Telegram channel posts. The default https://rsshub.app provided by RSSHub official actually cannot work with Telegram. So you should deploy a RSSHub on your own. See RSSHub docs about it for detailed steps (You can also find how to cost-freely deploy RSSHub like using Heroku or Vercel there).

Then use Docker image myl7/tgchan2tw:

docker run -d --restart=always --name tgchan2tw \
  -v ...:/db \
  -e APP_RSSHUB_URL=... \
  -e APP_TG_CHAN_NAME=... \
  -e APP_TW_CONSUMER_KEY=... \
  -e APP_TW_CONSUMER_SECRET=... \
  -e APP_TW_TOKEN_KEY=... \
  -e APP_TW_TOKEN_SECRET=... \
  myl7/tgchan2tw:1

All data, stored in a SQLite database, are in /db/db.sqlite by default. Mount it to somewhere to persistent the data.

Use env to configure app options. Dotenv is also OK by putting .env file into /app.

Options

All available options and their default value if exists can be found in pkg/cfg/cfg.go

Twitter secrets

To get the required Twitter secrets, go to Twitter Developer Platform to login into Developer Portal. You can get "Consumer Keys" and "Authentication Tokens" like:

Here I "Created with Read, Write, and Direct Messages permissions". Selecting only "Read and Write" should be fine too.

Docker tags

edge is used for the build of the latest commit. latest points to the build of the latest release. Semver is used in docker tags, so feel free to use tags like 1, 1.2, or 1.2.0

Onetime migration

If you are going to use the app for the first time, or due to unexpected bug the app stopped, and now you need to restart the app to migrate all leftover Telegram messages again to Twitter --- In these situations you should run a onetime migration.

Onetime migration is to set a so large PollRange (like 10000000000) and run the app to let it poll onetime. Then the app will try to forward all not forwarded messages again.

Due to limit of RSSHub, there is an upper limit of PollRange, so you can not use onetime migration to forward the whole of your five-year-old Telegram channel completely to Twitter. But if the app just missed messages of a few days, this can fix it.

License

Copyright 2021-2022 myl7

SPDX-License-Identifier: Apache-2.0