This bot provides realtime status updates and alerts on status changes for nodes on the ThreeFold Grid. You can find it live on @tfnodestatusbot.
If you want to run your own copy of the bot, you'll need a Linux system with Python installed. Visit the BotFather to create a new Telegram bot.
Here are the steps to prep a virtual environment to use with the bot. In some cases, such as when installing into a container, using a virtual environment might not be needed. If you're not sure, these steps should work everywhere:
git clone https://github.com/threefoldfoundation/node-status-bot.git
cd node-status-bot
python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
Since v2, the bot is now a two part deployment:
- The "ingester", which gathers data from tfchain and populates it into an SQLite database
- The bot itself, which depends on the presence of a database created by the ingester
Note that the function of the ingester is only needed for the feature of the bot that reports on farmerbot violations. However, there's no option to disable this feature and the bot will not run without a compatible database file. Running the ingester is not strictly required to use other features of the bot, but starting it once is necessary to create a database file.
To start up the ingester:
python3 ingester.py
By default, the ingester will place a database file tfchain.db in the same directory. You can change the location of the file with the -f or --file option. It will then begin to gather all data for the current minting period (the month so far, approximately) and will run continuously processing new blocks as they are created.
In order to efficiently clear any backlog of blocks when the ingester first starts, it will by default spawn 50 worker processes and scale them down later when the queue is cleared. For systems with limited RAM, you might want to cap the number of max workers lower, for example:
python3 ingester.py --max-workers 5
The ingester has a few other CLI args, which are used to control the start and end points between which data is gathered. These are mostly for testing and other use cases for the generated database.
Once the ingester is running, you can start up the bot in another shell like this, substituting your own bot token:
python node-status-bot.py <bot_token>
By default, the bot also looks in the current directory for a database file tfchain.db. A different path can be specified with -f.
Then go say hi to your bot on Telegram and try some commands.
For best results, bot the ingester and the bot should run under a process manager that can restart them if they exit for any reason. Nothing special is neede here really zinit, systemd, or other solutions will work fine. Just create basic unit/service files with the same commands shown above. Docker can be used for this purpose too.
Bugs? What bugs? 😆
Please open an issue on this repo for any problems you encounter or features you desire.
For support on using the public bot or hosting your own (or just to say "hi"), you can also contact @scottyeager via Telegram.