First, you need to read the documentation on telegram bot, and create one : telegram bot docs. Once you own a bot and you have securely stored his token, you can go to the next step!

Once you have your bot, you need to be able to connect the to whale-alert api using one of the token they provide. You will find all the required informations here to get your api key : whale-alert authentication.

There is different pricing plans, the bot is well adapted for the free one with the base config.

To run the bot, you'll need to either have python 3.9.7 already installed, or install using a virtual environment (recommended) with pyenv & pyenv-virtualenv:

Go into the main folder, and simply run :

pyenv install 3.9.7
pyenv virtualenv 3.9.7 whale_alert_bot
pyenv activate whale_alert_bot

Go into the main folder, and simply run :

pip install -r requirements.txt

Finally, run the main script to run the bot, along with your tokens allocated to the right environment variables:

WHALE_ALERT_API_KEY=YOUR-TOKEN TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN=YOUR_TOKEN python src/bots/watcher_bot.py

Or add the environment variables to a .env file, within the same folder as the settings.py file (recommended). They will be imported automatically while running the bot.

As we have seen previously, the bot can be personalised thanks to a bunch of environment variables to set in your .env file:

TRANSACTION_ENDPOINT

The endpoint to fetch transactions, defaults to the current on in whale-alert.

STATUS_ENDPOINT

The endpoint to fetch connection to blockchain statuses, defaults to the current on in whale-alert.

API_KEY

Your whale-alert API key. This is required.

TELEGRAM_BOT_KEY

Your telegram bot key. This is required.

MIN_INTERVAL

Minimum interval (in seconds) for which we want to allow the transaction alerts. Defaults to 15.

HISTORY_TIME_LIMIT

Maximum interval (in seconds) for which we want to allow the transaction alerts. Defaults to 3600 (free whale alert plan).

TX_VALUE_USD_THRESHOLD

Minimum value of the transactions we want to track (USD). Defaults to 500 000.

CURRENCY_WATCHED

Currency to watch. Default to None (all of them)

TX_ROWS_LIMIT

Limit amount of transactions per alert. Defaults to 100.

Once your bot is running, just like the normals bots, you can get more details about the commands with the following commands:

/help
/start

This command allows you to precisely check the status of the connection of whale-alert to the different blockchains it's monitoring.

/check_status <optional: data_keys>

The data_keys are arguments representing the specific data you want to fetch from the whale-alert blockchains status. Without this argument, all of them are returned.

/check_status status name

Will only return the status and the name of each connected blockchain, in the payload.

This is the main command of the bot : it's monitoring the transactions on the blockchains and gives you an alert of the statuses every dt seconds.

/watcher_timer seconds minutes <optional: data_keys>

Seconds and minutes are describing the interval between each alert sent by the bot. (Max. 1h with the free version of the whale-alert API).

data_keys, are, like previously, the data you want to filter out in the transactions payload of the response.

/watcher_timer 20 0 amount_usd symbol blockchain

Will give you an alert every 20 seconds of all the big transactions, only returning you the given arguments from the payload described here

More detailed commands and more commands in development :)