Yesterday, we launched a service to relay messages between IRC and Telegram, and we’re syncing 4 channels for KDE and 5 more for Kubuntu at this moment. The sync is two-way, so whatever people say on Telegram appears on the IRC channel, and vice versa. Almost everything works - almost being everything except that files and stickers shared on Telegram don’t appear on IRC.

So here’s a blog post about how we did it. An exclusive behind the scenes look at how KDE Sysadmin conducts their business, if you will.

Server Set-Up

The server that runs IRC services (a bouncer, bots for Zabbix, Bugzilla etc.) is an LXC container running Ubuntu 14.04.4 LTS. We don’t use docker or other application container services to virtualise apps - since we run such a diverse set of services written in different languages on the server, we just confine apps to their own users, and try to keep the dependencies confined to the user as far as possible.

To run the Telegram-IRC relay, we chose to use TeleIRC. TeleIRC fits our bill perfectly. It has all the features we want. It’s also written in JavaScript, which means it comes from the same community that brought us examples of groundbreaking engineering such as left-pad and is-positive-integer. Isolating this service from the rest of the system is critical, at least from a security perspective.

Step 1: Node.js

Ubuntu 14.04.4 LTS carries Node.js version 0.10 in its repositories. It’s too old and won’t do, as we found out much after actually installing teleirc, because npm won’t complain when you’re installing but teleirc will refuse to start because os has no method homedir().

So we’ll have to manually obtain a current version of Node.js. Thankfully, we can use the Node Version Manager to obtain a binary build of a current version of Node.js directly from the Node website.

Start with a fresh user - let’s call it teletubby - and log in. Because it’s Node, the “recommended” method for installing nvm is by curl-ing a script and piping it to bash. It’s an idea that’s brilliantly simple and has provably zero security flaws. Of course, because we’re KDE and we like to do things the hard way, I decided to forego this easy install procedure and do things manually:

teletubby (~) $: mkdir TeleIRC
teletubby (~) $: cd TeleIRC
teletubby (~/TeleIRC) $: git clone https://github.com/creationix/nvm.git

At this point it’ll clone the nvm repository to ~/TeleIRC/nvm. If you’re feeling particularly adventurous, you can use this as-is (using the current master), but I like to stay on the stable branch. nvm’s repo makes that easy - all you need to do is to checkout the latest stable tag:

teletubby (~/TeleIRC/nvm) $: git checkout `git describe --abbrev=0 --tags`

At this point, you’ll need to add the nvm set-up script to your Bash profile, so add the following lines to ~/.profile:

export NVM_DIR="$HOME/TeleIRC/nvm"
[ -s "$NVM_DIR/nvm.sh" ] && . "$NVM_DIR/nvm.sh"

Log out and log back in (or start a new login shell), and you should be able to use the nvm command right away.

You’ll actually have to install a version of Node.js now. The current LTS branch of Node.js is the v4.4 branch (the current release as of writing is v4.4.4). You can do:

teletubby (~) $: nvm ls-remote

to see what versions of Node.js are available for you to install. To install the 4.4 branch, just do:

teletubby (~) $: nvm install v4.4

And when it’s done installing, run node to make sure you get a Node.js prompt.

Step 2: Telegram Bot and IRC Account

To get the Telegram Bot account, you’ll have to talk to @BotFather.

Start by asking for a new bot:

/newbot

BotFather is pretty conversational. It’ll first ask you for the full name you want to give to the bot, and then an username. Our service is called KDE IRC Relay Service, and the username is IrcsomeBot. Note that your bot’s username must end with either bot or _bot.

Once you give it a full name and an username, it’ll give you an API key. Keep this key secure. If you lose it, you can generate a new one, but make sure it’s never compromised.

To let your bot see every message that’s said in the group (so that it can read the messages and relay them to IRC), you’ll have to disable privacy for the bot:

<Me>: /setprivacy
<BotFather>: Choose a bot to change group messages settings.
<Me>: @IrcsomeBot
<BotFather>: 'Enable' - your bot will only receive messages that either start with the '/' symbol or mention the bot by username.
<BotFather>: 'Disable' - your bot will receive all messages that people send to groups.
<BotFather>: Current status is: ENABLED
<Me>: Disable
<BotFather>: Success! The new status is: DISABLED. /help

Note that to denote the channel now, we’re using the notation @username, not just username. We’ll prefix the username with the @ sign everywhere we want to refer to the bot from now on.

All the essential Bot account set-up is complete, so it’s time to move on to the IRC account creation. This differs from IRC network to IRC network, but for Freenode it’s pretty simple. Start by picking a nickname that your bot will use, logging on to chat.freenode.net with any IRC client as said nickname, and running the following command at the server window:

/msg NickServ REGISTER password email@example.com

You’ll get an email from Freenode with another /msg command you’ll need to type to confirm your registration. Do that, and you’re done.

Step 3: TeleIRC

Once node is up and running, and you’ve got your accounts, it’s time to install TeleIRC.

Installing TeleIRC is incredibly easy. Just run:

teletubby (~/TeleIRC) $: npm install teleirc

And check that ~/TeleIRC/node_modules/teleirc/bin/teleirc exists. At this point, you might want to add $HOME/TeleIRC/node_modules/.bin to your PATH environment variable, so that you can run the teleirc command without prefixing it with a path.

The first thing to do is to generate a configuration file, and edit it. Generate the sample config by running:

teletubby (~/TeleIRC) $: teleirc --genconfig

This will create a sample configuration file and drop it at ~/.teleirc/config.js. Edit it with your favourite text editor. It’s well commented, so you shouldn’t have any problem setting things up. The Telegram API Key goes into a variable defined near the top of the file, and the IRC settings go towards the bottom.

For Freenode, the default IRC config generated doesn’t have spaces for a nick and a password, so refer to the snippet below for what to set:

config.ircOptions = {
    userName: 'FreenodeUserName',
    realName: 'The Real Name',
	nick: 'yournick',
	password: 'yourpassword',
    port: 7000,
    secure: true,
    sasl: true
};

Freenode allows SSL connections over port 7000, and you’ll need to have SASL enabled because otherwise TeleIRC won’t be able to authenticate your nick and password.

Of course, don’t forget to actually set up the channel-group mappings.

Once you’re done, start teleirc by running:

teletubby (~/TeleIRC) $: teleirc

Nothing should bomb, except a bunch of warning about chat_ids not being found. That’s not an error. Now just go to every group where you want the bot to be present, add the bot’s username and say something. The relay should just start working.

Step 4: Running Forever

It turns out you can actually do this without messing with your init scripts. All you need is another npm package called forever, and Cron. Yes, Cron.

Start by installing forever:

teletubby (~/TeleIRC) $: npm install forever

Check if it runs:

teletubby (~/TeleIRC) $: forever start `which teleirc`
teletubby (~/TeleIRC) $: forever list

You should see a table with an entry for teleirc, along with a path to the log file, which you can cat to read teleirc’s output. The entry should also have a number associated with it (0, if it’s the only service running). You can control it by running:

teletubby (~/TeleIRC) $: forever restart 0   # to restart the service
teletubby (~/TeleIRC) $: forever stop 0      # to stop the service

Once you’ve verified that things run, and you can control the process, it’s time to make sure that the service runs at system start. Start by creating a script with the following content:

#!/bin/sh
forever start `which teleirc`

Then, run:

teletubby (~/TeleIRC) $: crontab -e

Your text editor should open with a crontab file. You’ll need to add one line to the bottom:

@reboot /full/path/to/your/start/script.sh

And make sure that the cron service is enabled. That’s it!

In Conclusion

So the service is up and running, and any KDE IRC channel that wants to be mirrored with a Telegram group just needs to file a Sysadmin Task on our Phabricator instance.

I hope this helped you out if you’re looking for ways to bridge your IRC and Telegram channels together. Until next time!