This Telegram bot allows you to subscribe to notifications about early appointments at the citizen centres (Bürgerämter) in Hannover, Germany. Please note that all texts except the documentation are in german.

You can add @hannover_buergeramt_bot on Telegram. The bot provides the following commands:

• /deadline: Subscribe to notifications about appointments earlier than a given deadline. The date format is DD.MM.YYYY.
• /termine: Query the 10 earliest appointments
• /stop: Disable notifications
• /start, /hilfe: Print a help message

If you want to host this bot yourself you have to clone the repository and create a new virtual environment in the directory of the cloned repo.

git clone https://github.com/Popkornium18/hannover-buergeramt-bot
cd hannover-buergeramt-bot
python -m venv venv
. venv/bin/activate
pip install wheel
pip install -r requirements.txt

If you intend to use systemd for logging and want to use MySQL/MariaDB as your database, you have to install the optional dependencies as well. Make sure that you have the systemd header files installed. On Debian/Ubuntu these headers are provided by libsystemd-dev.

pip install -r optional-requirements.txt

Next you have to copy the default configuration and add the API token of your bot. Available configuration options are documented in the example config file as comments.

cp config.py{.example,}

Now you can run the bot like this:

python bot.py

If you want to use a systemd service to autostart the bot at boot time (which is highly recommended), feel free to copy this template:

[Unit]
Description=Hannover Bürgeramt Bot
After=network.target

[Service]
Type=simple
User=YOUR_USER
Group=YOUR_GROUP
WorkingDirectory=/PATH/TO/hannover-buergeramt-bot
ExecStart=/PATH/TO/hannover-buergeramt-bot/venv/bin/python bot.py
Restart=always

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target