I created this small program, both to play a little more with Go, but also because I have numerous unattended machines at home. Wanting to keep their Linux distributions up to date, I run cron-apt (yeah, they are Debian based), in order to monitor if new packages become available.

But the default way of using cron-apt is to have it send an email. Setting up an email server has become increasingly difficult, as an effect of Google tightening the screw on spam - and thank God for that.

So I made a small program that can watch a file for a certain keyword and send that line to a Telegram receiver (channel or person)

You'll need the Telegram receiver ID and a Bot token before your start. It's not that bad. Bot tokens you can get from the almighty BotFather. The receiver ID is a little bit more tricky, but after creating the Bot (with a name) you can invite the bot into the intended group, and follow this guide. You'll only need to do this once.

Example

go run main.go --token <BotToken> --receiver <ReceiverID> --filename /var/log/system.log --filter "respawn"

this creates a watcher of file /var/log/system.log looking for keyword respawn and sends those lines to

• Create JSON configuration - make behaviour more like LogWatcher
• Make the program shut down proper, by letting all go-routines listen to signals from channel