How to setup a Telegram bot for your Drone CI/CD builds

In my last post I presented Drone, an extremely light CI/CD server.

One cool and satisfying thing is to be automatically notified of the output of your pipelines. In a company, you would probably use a Slack or HipChat bot. For a personal use, I think a Telegram bot is a good idea.

Let’s setup one!

Creating a Telegram bot

Setting up a bot is free and actually very easy. You can do everything from a Telegram client.

See the bots documentation. TL;DR, send a message to @botfather and follow what it says. Choose a handle, a name and a profile picture.

Then, save the token it will give you, e.g.:

Here is the token for bot Drone CI/CD @angristan_drone_bot…

Once the bot is created, open a conversation with it using its handle and send /start. Otherwise, the bot won’t be able to contact you afterwards.

Next, you will need your Telegram chat ID (which is not your username).

There are multiple ways to do this, including a number of bots. You can use @get_id_bot.

Setting up a Telegram pipeline

We will use the drone-telegram plugin from appleboy.

Here is a basic pipeline:

pipeline:
  telegram-notification:
    image: appleboy/drone-telegram
    secrets: [telegram_token, telegram_to]

You will need to add secrets to your Drone repo. You can do it using the drone-cli:

drone secret add -repository user/repo -name telegram_to -value "..."
drone secret add -repository user/repo -name telegram_token -value "..."

telegram_to being your chat ID and telegram_token being your bot’s token.

You will now receive messages upon builds:

We can make the messages look better. Here is my usual pipeline:

pipeline:
  telegram-notification:
    image: appleboy/drone-telegram
    secrets: [telegram_token, telegram_to]
    when:
      status: [success, failure]
    format: markdown
    message: >
      {{#success build.status}}
      ✅ Build #{{build.number}} of `{{repo.name}}` succeeded.

      📝 Commit by {{commit.author}} on `{{commit.branch}}`:

      ```
      {{commit.message}}
      ```

      🌐 {{ build.link }}
      {{else}}
      ❌ Build #{{build.number}} of `{{repo.name}}` failed.

      📝 Commit by {{commit.author}} on `{{commit.branch}}`:

      ```
      {{commit.message}}
      ```

      🌐 {{ build.link }}
      {{/success}}

I know, it looks a bit awful. I mean, Markdown inside YAML… But the result is cool!

By default, the pipeline will not be executed if prior pipelines fail. We want to receive a notification regardless of what happened, so this does the trick:

when:
  status: [success, failure]

As you can see in the plugin documentation, you add all sorts of attachments and use quite a lot of variables and functions inside of your messages. Enjoy!