Telegram-Bot

Testing for developing a Telegram Bot

Documentation:

• The Official API: https://core.telegram.org/api --> Only concerned with the bot API
• Bots API: https://core.telegram.org/bots/api
• Bots Info: https://core.telegram.org/bots
• Python BASIC bot: https://djangostars.com/blog/how-to-create-and-deploy-a-telegram-bot/

Useful Tools:

• Ngrok: https://ngrok.com/download --> A temporary HTTPS tunnelling solution for the Telegram API to have access to local PC
• For windows - BASH (very helpful & easy, its a UNIX shell) -- Built into GIT!!! (Yay). This gives windows many UNIX commands that linux and macOS enjoy!
• Linux and macOS are ideal as servers mainly use them

Good to know:

There are different methods to interfacing with telegram, mainly through Webhooks, and standard HTTPS requests. To put it plainly, Webhooks carry a lot more customisation, access to data and more extensive options with regards to interfacing/accessing the API, however they carry with them the annoyance of requiring a HTTPS web-server for the secure handshakes which becomes annoying for small devs without access to an SSL certified HTTPS server address. This is where the HTTP request method comes in handy as you require no servers etc. to access some information (its limited though and most likely will not be the way the majority of bots are implemented), it is however handy when just wanting test your connection to the bot...

Easy commands to test your connection to the bot 🔥:

https://api.telegram.org/bot<token>/getUpdates --> Basic status
https://api.telegram.org/bot<your-token>/sendMessage?chat_id=&text=<your-text> --> Basic send message
https://api.telegram.org/bot<your-token>/setWebhook?url=<some-url> --> Set Webhook URL

The stuff after the / are commands sent to the Telegram Bots API which will return a JSON back.

A typical JSON response looks like this:

{"ok":true,"result":[{"update_id":523349956, "message":{"message_id":51,"from":{"id":303262877,"first_name":"YourName"},"chat":{"id":303262877,"first_name":"YourName","type":"private"},"date":1486829360,"text":"Hello"}}]}

The JSON can easily be explored as its message structure resembles:

.message
├── message_id
├── from
│   ├── id
│   └── first_name
├── chat
│   ├── id
│   ├── first_name
│   └── type
├── date
└── text

This means that accessing say, the chat id (with python) is as simple as chat = jsonData['message']['chat']['id'].

TODO:

• Rope Nic into your crazy project 👍
• Make readme 👊
• Basic python Webhook 👌
• NodeJS implementation -- so much better
• Look into python-telegram API/libraries
• More advanced python bot
• Consider C++ implementation/libraries
• Create website
• SSL (wildcard) the website
• Forward the website to server
• World domination
• Buy server while dreaming