Getting started with telegram-bot

Remarks#

This section provides an overview of what telegram-bot is, and why a developer might want to use it.

It should also mention any large subjects within telegram-bot, and link out to the related topics. Since the Documentation for telegram-bot is new, you may need to create initial versions of those related topics.

Create a bot with the BotFather

Open a chat with @BotFather in Telegram and click the /start command.

After you get a list of commands Select the command /newbot to get this Message:

Alright, a new bot. How are we going to call it? Please choose a name for your bot.

Enter a name for your bot, which can be anything, and send it. After that BotFather will ask for a username for your bot:

Good. Now let’s choose a username for your bot. It must end in bot. Like this, for example: TetrisBot or tetris_bot.

That must end with “bot”. If your desired username is taken or not available, try again with another name.

Finally your bot is created and the following message is shown. You must use the bot token to communicate with the Telegram, so make sure you write it down.

Done! Congratulations on your new bot. You will find it at telegram.me/???bot. You can now add a description, about section and profile picture for your bot, see /help for a list of commands. By the way, when you’ve finished creating your cool bot, ping our Bot Support if you want a better username for it. Just make sure the bot is fully operational before you do this.

Use this token to access the HTTP API: xxx:xxx

With the gained token you now can send a test message by calling the website https://api.telegram.org/botBOTTOKEN/sendmessage?chat_id=YOURCHATID&text=YOURTEXT

There are two general methods for the telegram bots for interaction: a push and a pull method. Using the pull method you have to call the /getupdates every once in a while to check if there are new messages send to your bot. The push method uses a webhook (/setwebhook method) to your script which is called every time a user sends a message to your bot.

The provided information is a JSON formatted file with all the info (of the sender and the message) you need.

You can write your bot in many languages (PHP, Python, Lua…) as long as they can handle the webhook as an input and can call websites.

For more info you can always use the BOT API documentation which you can find here.