Hugo Links Bot

Telegram bot that automatically adds links to the content/links/_index.md file of a Hugo site hosted on GitHub Pages.

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How it works

1. You send a message with a URL to the bot on Telegram
2. The bot fetches the page title automatically
3. A formatted entry is prepended to content/links/_index.md via the GitHub API
4. The GitHub Actions workflow triggers and deploys the updated site within ~2 minutes

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Message Format

The bot parses three components from your message: URL, tags, and comment.

https://example.com #tag1 #tag2 Optional comment here

Component	Required	Format	Example
URL	✅ Yes	Must start with http:// or https://	https://martinfowler.com/articles/data-mesh.html
Tags	❌ No	Words prefixed with #	#datamesh #architecture
Comment	❌ No	Any text that is not a URL or tag	Interesting take on data ownership

Examples

URL only:

https://martinfowler.com/articles/data-mesh.html

URL with tags:

https://martinfowler.com/articles/data-mesh.html #datamesh #architecture

URL with tags and comment:

https://martinfowler.com/articles/data-mesh.html #datamesh #architecture Interesting take on data ownership

Order does not matter — tags and comment can appear before or after the URL:

#ai #governance https://example.com Great overview of AI governance frameworks

Output in the markdown file

Each message produces an entry like this:

- [Page Title](https://example.com) — Great overview of AI governance frameworks
  `#ai` `#governance`
  `2026-05-07`

If the page title cannot be fetched (e.g. the site blocks scraping), the domain name is used as fallback:

- [example.com](https://example.com)
  `2026-05-07`

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Environment Variables

Variable	Description
TELEGRAM_TOKEN	Token from @BotFather
GITHUB_TOKEN	GitHub Fine-grained Personal Access Token (Contents: read/write)
GITHUB_REPO	Repository in owner/repo format (default: thrama/thrama.github.io)
ALLOWED_USER_ID	Your Telegram numeric user ID (see below)

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Deploy on Railway

1. Create a new private GitHub repo (e.g. hugo-links-bot) and push these 3 files: bot.py, requirements.txt, Procfile
2. Go to railway.app → login with GitHub
3. New Project → Deploy from GitHub repo → select hugo-links-bot
4. Go to the service → tab Variables → add the 4 environment variables above
5. Railway deploys automatically after saving the variables

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Get your Telegram User ID

Open Telegram, search @RawDataBot, send any message. It replies with a JSON — your ID is the value of message.from.id.

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Get a Telegram Bot Token

1. Open Telegram → search @BotFather
2. Send /newbot
3. Follow the prompts to choose a name and username
4. BotFather replies with your token — copy the full string including the numeric prefix (e.g. 7123456789:AAF...)

Verify the token is valid:

https://api.telegram.org/botYOUR_TOKEN/getMe

Should return "ok": true.

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Files

File	Description
bot.py	Main bot script
requirements.txt	Python dependencies
Procfile	Railway worker definition