Use Telegram Bot for staying in touch with your Javascript apps health

👋 Hi there!

Prehistory

A few days ago in the evening, my team leader wrote to me that he found that a new feature that I added to our application was causing an error. And then I thought I needed a way to stay in touch with all critical errors.

At that moment I got an idea: make a npm package for integrating projects existing log service with telegram bot and log everything I need to know.

And here you may have questions:

- Why not to use one of existing cool packages for creating telegram bots and just send log messages?

- Because all of existing packages for creating telegram bots are overwhelmed for this usecase. For this task enough just one function for sending messages to chat

- Why do I need another one npm package?

- The answer is simple: I wanted to learn how to create and publish my own packages

And here we are: I present my first npm package ever, called node-telegram-log

joeberetta / node-telegram-logger

Telegram Logger

Simple Telegram logger for node.js.

Install

$ npm install node-telegram-log

Prerequisites

1. Create telegram bot and get it's token:

2. Add bot to group or go to bot's page and /start

3. Get chat_id where bot will send messages. Feel free to use IDBot to get chat_id

Usage

const { TelegramLogger } = require('node-telegram-log');
const logger = new TelegramLogger(BOT_TOKEN_ID, CHAT_ID);

// Log some message
logger.log('Hooray! It works');
// Formatted message
/**
 * ℹ️ LOG
 *
 * Hooray! It works
 */

// Or debug
logger.debug('Just debugging it', { canILogObjects: true });

// Formatted message
/**
 * ⚙️ DEBUG
 *
 * Just debugging it
 * {
 *   "canILogObjects": true
 * }
 */

// Mention user, who must to pay attention to this message
// Note: @mentions work only if

…

View on GitHub

How to use

• First of all create bot. You can read this article if you don't know how;

• After you have finished setting up your bot, we can move on
  

npm install node-telegram-log # Install as project dependency

• Let's log it!

const { TelegramLogger } = require('node-telegram-log');

const BOT_TOKEN_ID = 'YOUR BOT TOKEN' // Got it in previous step
const CHAT_ID = 1234 // Feel free to use https://t.me/myidbot

const logger = new TelegramLogger(BOT_TOKEN_ID, CHAT_ID);

// Some logic here...

logger.log('Hooray! It works');

// Notify a colleague about a problem
// Note: @mentions work only if part of message starts with @username
logger.error('@joeberetta', 'Something went wrong:', { formatted: true });

At last

Interesting fact: when I published this package I found that similar one exists already!

Feel free to use it (or just Ctrl+C/V it from repo 😁😁😁) and contact me if you have any questions, ideas or issues.

Thanks to @ispoljari for his cool and motivational post:

I just created my first NPM package. It ain't much but it's honest work

Ivan Spoljaric ・ Jul 24 '20

#javascript #webdev #npm #motivation

Thanks for reading this post 🙏