Book Car Bot

Bot used to perform bookings to a car (or any other 1-use-at-a-time item).

Available Commands

The available commands are

• /book from-to-[certain] : book etios at [from, to] with given certainty. Eg: /book today 16:00-18:00, /book today 16:00-18:00-F
• /getBooked from : get all bookings from that date. Eg: /getBooked friday
• /getBooked : get all bookings
• /unbook from : Unbook from appointment. Eg: /unbook friday 16:00
• /myBooked : get my bookings
• /confirm from : Confirm uncertain booking. Eg: /confirm friday 16:00

Credentials File

Before deploying the bot, you must complete the values in the credentials.py file.

• bot_token is a string with the access token obtained from BotFather
• URL is a string with the heroku app link created. Eg: https://appname.herokuapp.com/
• allowed_unames is a list of allowed Telegram usernames. Only these users will be able to run commands

Steps to Deploy the Bot

Follow these steps to have your bookings bot ready to go.

1. Complete the allowed_unames variable from the credentials.py file with the Telegram usernames that should be able to use the bot and perform bookings.
2. Send a /newbot message to the BotFather, which is essentially a bot used to create other bots. Choose a name and a username and you will get a token.
   • Copy the token to the bot_token variable in the credentials.py file.
3. Create a new app from the Heroku dashboard or using the Heroku CLI. A free tier works perfectly for this bot.
   • Copy the app's domain to the URL variable in the credentials.py file.
4. Login to heroku with heroku login.
5. If you haven't already, initialize a GIT repository in this directory with git init.
6. Add your heroku project as a GIT remote with heroku git:remote -a {heroku-project-name}.
7. Deploy the app by adding the files to the repo with git add ., creating a commit with git commit -m "Commit Message" and push to the heroku remote with git push heroku master
   • You can check the status of the deployment by viewing the logs with the command heroku logs --tail
8. Go to the app page and check if the webhook is up by accessing https://appname.herokuapp.com/setwebhook. If you get a webhook setup ok message, the bot should be ready to use.

You can try sending messages to the bot and checking the app's logs to verify that the app is working OK.

Connect the Bot to your DB

The bot connects to a MongoDB database, where it saves a collection of all bookings made. To connect the bot to your MongoDB database, follow these steps.

1. Set up your Atlas Cluster at https://cloud.mongodb.com/. A free tier works perfectly for this bot. You can find a more detailed explanation of the steps required at this tutorial.
2. Create a database user for your cluster with the Password authentication method.
3. Grant network access to your cluster from your app's IP address. If you have a free tier app and no credit card associated to your account, you'll have to allow access from anywhere, as your app's IP address will be dynamic.
   • There are a few Heroku add-ons that allow you to assign a static IP address to your app. Some of them have a free tier that can work perfectly with this bot if your use case does not require plenty of requests. But you need to set up a credit card in your Heroku account to use add-ons (even if you don't have any charges).
4. Set an environment variable named MONGODB_URI in Heroku with the URL to connect to your cluster. Copy the connection string obtained from the dashboard (Connect > Connect your application), replace your password and database name and set it with the Heroku CLI. The command will look something like this: heroku config:set MONGODB_URI="mongodb+srv://yourUsername:yourPassword@yourClusterName.h4nxa.mongodb.net/database?retryWrites=true&w=majority".