TelegramAlert

A lightweight Go daemon that monitors a folder for files whose modification time falls within a configurable age window and sends a Telegram alert when matching files are found.

Features

• Monitors a directory (non-recursive, top-level only) for files modified within a configurable time window
• Sends formatted Telegram messages via the Bot API
• Runs as a background service with init.d support
• Configurable check interval
• Custom config file path via the -config flag

Installation

Prerequisites

• Go 1.24 or later
• A Telegram Bot token and a chat ID

Build

git clone https://github.com/giulianozor/TelegramAlert.git
cd TelegramAlert
make build

This produces the telegram-alert binary. Alternatively run go build -o telegram-alert . directly.

Configuration

Copy the example configuration file and edit it with your settings:

cp config.yml.example config.yml

monitor:
  # Folder path to monitor for file changes
  folder: /var/log/myapp

  # Minimum file age in minutes (files must be at least this old)
  min_age_minutes: 5

  # Maximum file age in minutes (files must have been modified within this window)
  max_age_minutes: 60

  # How often to repeat the check, in minutes
  check_interval_minutes: 10

telegram:
  # Telegram Bot API token (get from @BotFather)
  bot_token: "YOUR_BOT_TOKEN_HERE"

  # Telegram chat ID to send alerts to (can be a user or group chat ID)
  chat_id: "YOUR_CHAT_ID_HERE"

Usage

By default the application looks for config.yml in the current directory. Use the -config flag to specify a different path:

# Use the default config.yml in the current directory
./telegram-alert

# Specify a custom config file path
./telegram-alert -config /etc/telegram-alert/config.yml

# Show available flags
./telegram-alert -help

Flags

Flag	Default	Description
-config	config.yml	Path to the YAML configuration file

Running as a Service

An init.d script is provided at init.d/telegram-alert. Install and configure it according to your distribution's init system to run TelegramAlert as a daemon that starts automatically on boot.

Development

Run the test suite:

go test ./...

The Makefile provides build, test, vet, lint, fmt, install, run and clean targets.