Botigen

Botigen is a Telegram bot that submits the Israeli Ministry of Education home antigen test declaration for your children. You tap a button in Telegram, and the bot logs in to the Ministry's parents portal with a headless Chrome browser (Selenium), marks the selected children as tested negative, submits the form, and sends you a screenshot of the result.

It was built for parents who had to file this declaration repeatedly for several children during the COVID-19 school antigen-testing period.

• Features
• How It Works
• Requirements
• Installation
• Configuration
• Usage
• Security Notes
• Troubleshooting
• Development
• Contributing
• License

• Interactive Telegram menu with inline buttons (the bot's messages are in Hebrew).
• Report for selected children: pick one or more children from a list; picked children get a ✅ mark.
• Report for all children in one tap.
• Logs in to the Ministry of Education portal with your parent credentials and fills in the antigen test declaration (marks each selected child as negative) automatically.
• Sends a screenshot of the submitted form back to the chat as confirmation.
• Greets you by the parent name shown in the portal profile (falls back to your Telegram first name).
• Caches the children list in kids.json, so the menu opens quickly without logging in first.

sequenceDiagram
    participant U as Parent (Telegram)
    participant B as Botigen
    participant S as Ministry of Education portal
    Note over B,S: On startup
    B->>S: Log in (headless Chrome)
    S-->>B: Parent name + children list
    B->>B: Save children to kids.json
    U->>B: /start or /sign
    B-->>U: Menu (inline keyboard)
    U->>B: Choose children, then "report"
    B->>S: Log in, mark children negative, submit form
    S-->>B: Confirmation dialog
    B-->>U: Form screenshot + success message

1. On startup, the bot logs in to the portal, reads the parent name and the children's names and IDs, writes them to kids.json, and closes the browser.
2. It then polls Telegram for messages.
3. When you submit a report, it opens a new browser session, logs in again, selects the "negative" option for each chosen child, clicks שליחה (Send), accepts the confirmation dialog, and sends you a screenshot of the form.

• A Telegram bot token from @BotFather.
• Credentials for the Ministry of Education identification system (the username and password you use to log in to the parents portal).
• Docker (recommended). The image is based on techblog/selenium, which provides Chrome and ChromeDriver at /opt/chromedriver/chromedriver.
• To run without Docker: Python 3, Google Chrome, and a matching ChromeDriver at /opt/chromedriver/chromedriver (the path is hard-coded in app/helpers.py).

The image is published on Docker Hub as techblog/botigen (linux/amd64 only).

docker run -d \
  --name botigen \
  --restart unless-stopped \
  -e BOT_TOKEN="<telegram-bot-token>" \
  -e EDU_SITE_USER="<portal-username>" \
  -e EDU_SITE_PASSWORD="<portal-password>" \
  techblog/botigen:latest

services:
  botigen:
    image: techblog/botigen:latest
    container_name: botigen
    restart: unless-stopped
    environment:
      BOT_TOKEN: "<telegram-bot-token>"
      EDU_SITE_USER: "<portal-username>"
      EDU_SITE_PASSWORD: "<portal-password>"

git clone https://github.com/t0mer/Botigen.git
cd Botigen
docker build -t botigen .

All configuration is done with environment variables.

The image does not declare a volume. To keep the children cache across container re-creation, you can bind-mount a file to /opt/app/kids.json, but the host file must already exist and contain a valid kids.json (for example, one copied out of a running container with docker cp botigen:/opt/app/kids.json ./kids.json). If the host file is missing, Docker creates a directory instead; if it is empty, parsing fails. In both cases the error is only logged and the menu shows no children.

Open a chat with your bot and send /start (or /sign). The bot replies with a menu:

After a report is submitted, the bot sends a screenshot of the form followed by "הדיווח הושלם בהצלחה" ("The report was completed successfully").

• Anyone who finds your bot can use it. ALLOWED_IDS is read but never checked, so any Telegram user who messages the bot can trigger a declaration with your portal credentials and see your children's names. Keep the bot's username private.
• Your Ministry of Education password is passed as an environment variable. Protect the host, your Compose file, and any .env file that contains it, and never commit them to git.
• kids.json contains your children's names and ID numbers, and preview.png contains a screenshot of the form. Treat both as personal data.
• The headless browser runs with --no-sandbox and --ignore-certificate-errors.

• The children list is wrong or out of date. The list is cached in /opt/app/kids.json and is only fetched from the portal when that file does not exist. Delete the file (or re-create the container) and restart the bot.
• The menu shows no children. The initial login or page scraping failed. Check the container logs (docker logs botigen) for oh snap something went wrong and verify EDU_SITE_USER and EDU_SITE_PASSWORD.
• Submitting fails after the portal changes. The bot relies on fixed element IDs, class names, and URLs of the portal pages; any change on the Ministry's side breaks the automation.

Project layout:

app/
  app.py        # Telegram bot, menus, and the Selenium form-filling flow
  helpers.py    # Headless Chrome (Selenium) setup
Dockerfile      # Based on techblog/selenium
requirements.txt
VERSION         # Version used to tag the Docker image

Run locally (Linux, with Chrome and ChromeDriver at /opt/chromedriver/chromedriver):

pip install -r requirements.txt
cd app
BOT_TOKEN=... EDU_SITE_USER=... EDU_SITE_PASSWORD=... python app.py

selenium is not listed in requirements.txt; it comes from the techblog/selenium base image, so install it yourself when running outside Docker. app/helpers.py passes executable_path= to webdriver.Chrome, which was removed in Selenium 4.10, so pin an older release:

pip install "selenium<4.10"

Publishing a GitHub release triggers .github/workflows/docker.yml, which builds the image for linux/amd64 and pushes techblog/botigen:latest and techblog/botigen:<version>, where <version> is read from the VERSION file.

Issues and pull requests are welcome at t0mer/Botigen.

Botigen is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0.