julianfbeck / gh-action-telegram-birthday-reminder-template

Telegram Birthday GH-Action

Setup Actions

Copy this template repository to your own account and follow the steps below.

Make sure the repository is private, you don't want to share your all your birthdays with the world

Step 1 - Create a Telegram Bot

To create a Telegram Bot you can follow the instructions here

Step 2 - Setup the Repository Secrets

You need to add the following secrets to your repository:

BOT_TOKEN - The token you received from the BotFather

CHAT_ID - The Chat ID of the chat you want to send the messages. Find out how to get the Chat ID here

Step 3 - Setup the Birthday File

The Birthday File is a yaml file located at the root of the repository. It contains the birthdays of the people you want to be reminded of. The file should look like this:

timezone: Europe/Berlin
birthdays:
  - name: Example User
    date: 1980-02-26
  - name: Example User 2
    date: 1980-02-24
  - name: Example User
    date: 02-26
  - name: Example User 2
    date: 02-24
  - name: Example User 5
    date: 1980-02-28

The timezone needs to be set. To find the correct timezone you can use this list.

The birthdays section contains a list of all the birthdays. The name is the name of the person and the date is the date of the birthday. The date can be in the format YYYY-MM-DD or MM-DD. If the date is in the format MM-DD can be used if you don't want to specify the year or don't know the year.

Step 4 - Configure the GitHub Action

The Cron Job is used to schedule the Action. You can find it inside the .github/workflows/birthday.yml file. You need to change the daily cron job to the time you want to be reminded of the birthdays. Githug Actions uses UTC time, so you need to convert your local time to UTC. You can use following website to convert the time: here

More Configurations

You can also configure the first_reminder and second_reminder to change the time the reminders are sent.

first_reminder: 2 # remind me 2 days before birthday
second_reminder: 4 # remind me 4 days before birthday