BOT_TOKEN must not be a necessary variable

[shubham282raj]

Hi,
Would it be possible to make the BOT_TOKEN environment variable optional?
Right now the repository requires a running Telegram bot because the BOT_TOKEN is mandatory. However, it would be really useful if the streaming component could work independently of the bot. This would allow the project to be used as a more general “streaming service for Telegram files”, without requiring a bot to be running.
The reason I’m asking is that I’m currently writing a Python project for a different purpose, and I only need the streaming functionality from this repository. At the moment, it’s difficult to reuse just that part because the codebase assumes a bot is always present.
If the BOT_TOKEN dependency could be made optional (or the streaming logic separated so it can run standalone), it would make the repository much easier to reuse and integrate into other projects.
Or if you could guide me towards, what would I need to do to make it work without BOT_TOKEN as I'm not really comfortable with reading/writing GO code, but I could try

Thanks for the great work on this project!

[EverythingSuckz]

Hey @shubham282raj, I was actually planning to make a change to minimize the env variables needed to start the bot but making BOT_TOKEN optional was not in that list.

Can you tell me more about the project and what component are you looking to be used? Are you gonna use the compiled binary in your project?

[shubham282raj]

Yeah sure
So, I've been using your project deployed on a server for a while and it has been working very well.
But when I had many files sent to the bot, I couldn't keep track of the streaming links of the files, I wanted to build a database where I could store the file metadata and the streaming link.
This is when I wrote another script where I built another bot which would forward the file to the same storage channel where your bot was sending them and I stored the message ID and hash (I mimicked the way you create the hash using the 4 metadata) along with the streaming link. And now I'm left with two bots, your bot would send the streaming link, while my bot adds the file and streaming link in my database.

Now that I realized I can just merge my script with your repo, use script for link bot handling and yours for the streaming route (as I went through your code and it looks like your streaming logic is pretty mature with the caching and multiple parallel chunks downloading).

Could you help me with that, if your script could just work without the BOT_TOKEN variable, and just use the MTProto to get just handle the streaming route (using message id and hash)?

[shubham282raj]

okay, very sorry for the confusion, looks like BOT_TOKEN would still be required. essentially you would require either a bot or a user session to get files anyway. i just have to disable the bot receiving the messages and sending the links back, that's for my use case as that is handled by my python script, thanks for the help though