Tag: heroku

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Heroku’s attempt to scare away users and its impact on my Heroku-Fanboy position

Anyone who may have read my past posts on this blog or knows my personal-IT life is most certainly aware of my preference to host personal and pre-MVP projects on Heroku – a formerly great choice for hosting your projects for free.

With Heroku’s most recent decision to drastically change their support for small projects, this has also drastically changed, leaving me disappointed and even in a condition near to mad.

In this article, I will explain what I love so much with Heroku, why it is was my platform of choice for most of my personal projects, what has changed on November 28, 2022, what are my thoughts about this, and what it means for my existing and future projects.

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Create your own Telegram bot with Django on Heroku – Part 11 – Apologies for the long pause! ?

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This entry is part 11 of 11 in the series Create your own Telegram bot with Django on Heroku

Django_Pony

⚠️ This article is outdated and discontinued since Heroku decided to no longer offer their free tiers as this article series suggests to use in August, 2022. Please see this post for details. ⚠️

The previous part of this series, in which we created a WebHook for our Telegram – bot, was written on December 5th, 2018. This is more than 20 months now without any update to this series – embarrassing ?. My sincere apologies for this! I had some changes in my job and was quite busy catching up.

This time, I will provide you with only a very (!) short update instead of a real article:
Since I recovered from this changed situation in the meantime, I’m planning to pick up this article series again. Since a lot of time has passed and most certainly even the most devoted readers forgot about the progress in previous parts in the meantime, I decided to add something new: A Git Repository which contains all changes so far, structured by tags that allow finding the proper entry point to the code, depending on which article you are reading, currently.

I hope to make the (re-)entry to the series a bit more easy and attractive by this.
I will also add results of future articles to that repository since I had a hard time why something so obvious came to my mind only so late in the article series …

Please find the Repository on GitHub.

Outlook for the next part of the series

So far, our bot is just capable to receive data. In the next article of this series, we will add a bit more functionality to the bot by adding a reply feature to it. I’m not 100% sure what this will be exactly yet, but I will try to come up with something interesting, educational and useful ?
Also, since this is about to become a bot to store your cash spendings, we will add pattern recognition logic to enable the bot to sum and track your spendings.
Also, when we saw that we ended up with a doubled record in our User table, we realized that the current string representation of the records for that table is not really helpful, displaying the same lines containing “Marc Richter” twice. Having displayed the same name twice made it hard to identify the correct record for deletion. We will change that as well and by that see how to make changes like this to a database that has already records stored to it, using Django’s workflows.

? Enjoy coding! ❤

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Create your own Telegram bot with Django on Heroku – Part 10 – Creating a view for your bot’s webhook

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This entry is part 10 of 11 in the series Create your own Telegram bot with Django on Heroku

Django_Pony

⚠️ This article is outdated and discontinued since Heroku decided to no longer offer their free tiers as this article series suggests to use in August, 2022. Please see this post for details. ⚠️

In the previous part of this series, we created another database model named Message to hold the message-data from our Telegram – bot. I also explained the process of defining a SQL schema using a Django model, what to consider during that phase and how to bring the Django’s model field reference docs to a good use during that process. Last but not least, we learned what a Heroku “One-Off Dyno” is and how it can be used to execute administrative tasks on our production site like applying outstanding migrations to a database.

This time, I will provide you with the last piece of the puzzle to make your bot available to the world. You will learn how to write and wire the Python code to actually use all that we have prepared so far. At the end of this part, your bot will be able to receive and store each message sent to it by registered users. And since it’s already more than a month since I published the previous article in this series, let’s not waste any more time and jump right in!

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Create your own Telegram bot with Django on Heroku – Part 6 – Creating the Django app

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This entry is part 6 of 11 in the series Create your own Telegram bot with Django on Heroku

 

 

Django_Pony

⚠️ This article is outdated and discontinued since Heroku decided to no longer offer their free tiers as this article series suggests to use in August, 2022. Please see this post for details. ⚠️

In the previous part of this series, I tried to give you a brief yet thorough introduction to hosting your projects with Heroku.
That part was special because it was a completely optional part of this series; if you prefer to host your applications on a different platform and skipped that article, I’d like to repeat that this is completely OK and that I had shown nothing you will need for anything different but interacting with Heroku. You will hopefully notice no blank spots in the following articles. There is no need to read that article if you do not plan to use Heroku for hosting your bot. But you should be familiar enough with your hosting solution of choice to adopt the Heroku – commands I show here to an adequate setup for your hosting solution.

Today we will finally start creating our bot with Django. What we did up until now was just some kind of preparation and establishing background. In this part, we will finally start with the real stuff. ?

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Create your own Telegram bot with Django on Heroku – Part 5 – Introduce Heroku

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This entry is part 5 of 11 in the series Create your own Telegram bot with Django on Heroku

⚠️ This article is outdated and discontinued since Heroku decided to no longer offer their free tiers as this article series suggests to use in August, 2022. Please see this post for details. ⚠️

In the previous part of this series, I tried to explain the differences in the two modes a Telegram bot supports: pull (getUpdates) and push (Webhook) methods. I also explained what a webhook is and how to easily giving it a test-drive, without any hassle.

Today we will talk about what Heroku is and about how to prepare your workstation to effectively work with that platform.

If you do not like Heroku or if you simply want to use another hosting service for your bot like AWS, OpenShift, Google Cloud Platform, whatever for any reason: That is perfectly OK and you can do so! I will write this and the next article on Heroku in a way that even when you decide to skip it completely, you won’t miss anything from this Telegram/Python/Django article series but the presentation of how to get the bot hosted on Heroku.
The only thing which you won’t be able to follow 1:1 in the upcoming parts of this series is that you can’t use those commands to trigger new deployments to the hosting platform with or do some minor, hosting platform related steps. But if you are advanced and familiar enough with deploying web applications to have a better idea of hosting an application than me, this shouldn’t be much of a problem for you, since most commands for Heroku are pretty straightforward and easy to adapt for a different system.

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Create your own Telegram bot with Django on Heroku – Part 3

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This entry is part 3 of 11 in the series Create your own Telegram bot with Django on Heroku

⚠️ This article is outdated and discontinued since Heroku decided to no longer offer their free tiers as this article series suggests to use in August, 2022. Please see this post for details. ⚠️

In the previous part of this series, I explained how to register bots on Telegram, how to configure it and how to validate everything is working.

Today I will explain a bit more on how the HTTP API works, how the JSON data provided by the bots ist structured and I will introduce you to telepot, the Python module of my choice for interacting with Telegram bots using Python.

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Create your own Telegram bot with Django on Heroku – Part 2

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This entry is part 2 of 11 in the series Create your own Telegram bot with Django on Heroku

⚠️ This article is outdated and discontinued since Heroku decided to no longer offer their free tiers as this article series suggests to use in August, 2022. Please see this post for details. ⚠️

In the previous part of this series, I introduced the overall idea about what we are trying to achieve and what’s the goal of it.

Today I will show you how to register and prepare your Bot using the Telegram app.

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Create your own Telegram bot with Django on Heroku – Part 1

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This entry is part 1 of 11 in the series Create your own Telegram bot with Django on Heroku

⚠️ This article is outdated and discontinued since Heroku decided to no longer offer their free tiers as this article series suggests to use in August, 2022. Please see this post for details. ⚠️

Recently, I finished my first Django application ✌. Since it took me some time to find a proper starting point to wrap my head around the basics of Django well enough to actually do something with it (apart from following tutorials, which pretty much all aim for creating a polling app for any reason ?), I’d like to recap and share that journey by writing this article about that.

I will describe the project, my thoughts and considerations about it and every step which has lead to what the project has become. I will try my best to make this a guide which everybody can follow along if he wants.

Also, I will make this a series, to not end up with an article so long and boring, that even interested readers cannot afford to read it in their spare time.
In this first part of the series, I will explain what this series will be about, mainly.

Continue reading “Create your own Telegram bot with Django on Heroku – Part 1”