This is a Telegram bot that, if made admin of a group, will delete any message containing an Amazon link and re-post it tagged with the specified affiliate tag.

It can be either messaged directly, or added as an administrator to a group or supergroup.

If messaged directly, it replies with the affiliate link, while in a group it will delete any message containing an Amazon link and replace it with a new message, with a format that is customizable through the GROUP_REPLACEMENT_MESSAGE environment variables.

Configuration

It requires two parameters through environment variables:

• TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN (required) is the token obtained from @Botfather.
• AMAZON_TAG (required) is the Amazon affiliate tag to be used when rewriting URLs.

You can set two optional parameters through environment variables:

• SHORTEN_LINKS: if set to "true", all the sponsored links generated by the bot will be passed through the bitly shortener, which generates amzn.to links.
• BITLY_TOKEN (required if SHORTEN_LINKS is "true") is the Generic Access Token you can get from bitly.
• AMAZON_TLD is the Amazon TLD for affiliate links (it defaults to "com", but you can set it to "it", "de", "fr" or whatever).
• GROUP_REPLACEMENT_MESSAGE specifies the format for the message that gets posted to groups after deleting the original one. If not set, it will default to Message by {USER} with Amazon affiliate link:\n\n{MESSAGE}. In the following table you'll find variables you can use.
• RAW_LINKS: if set to "true" disables this bot's "URL beautifier" (which removes all the URL parameters aside from the ASIN and the affiliate tag) and just adds/replaces the tag to the URL. This allows to link to arbitrary pages on Amazon, even non-product ones (e.g. search pages, category pages, etc.)
• IGNORE_USERS: a comma-separated list of usernames (starting with the "@" character) and numeric user IDs whose messages won't be acted upon by the bot, even if they contain matching Amazon links. A valid list would be "@Yourusername,12345678,@IgnoreMeAsWell123". Numeric user IDs are useful for users who do not have Telegram user names defined. You can get yours by contacting userinfobot.

String	Replacement
{USER}	The user that posted the message, as @username if they created a Telegram username, as first_name last_name otherwise.
{ORIGINAL_MESSAGE}	The user's original message, with no replacements (so it will contain the non-affiliated Amazon link).
{MESSAGE}	The user's message, with the affiliated Amazon link the bot created.

Running the app

You can either run the app directly through NodeJS

TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN=your-token AMAZON_TAG=your-tag node index.js

Or you can run it in Docker

docker run -e TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN=your-token -e AMAZON_TAG=your-tag --init lucatnt/telegram-bot-amazon

Note that the --init option is highly recommended because it allows you to stop the container through a simple Ctrl+C when running in the foreground. Without it you need to use docker stop.