Telegram Bot 4all

Create telegram bots never been so easy.

Goal

Serve as a starting point to develop telegram personal or public bots like :

• List my movies
• List my schedule
• Get random names
• Or whatever you want

Requirements

• Node.js >=14
• Telegram account
• Telegram Token (BotFather)

Steps

Step 1 : Telegram previous configurations

• Start new telegram chat with botFather and send the following commands:

• /start

• /newbot

• Enter : Name of your Bot

• Enter : Id of your Bot

  This step , will return to you the token. This is required to register and interact with your bot. Save it!!!

Step 2 : Create the bot with nodejs

• Clone the template : https://github.com/jrichardsz/telegram-bot-4all-demo.git
• This template has a command sample called /author who returns the name of creator of this tool

Step 3 : Deploy your bot

You need to deploy your bot (this source code) in a public server or domain: using some free or private service like: Heroku, Openshift, https://zeit.co/now, etc

Example with heroku:

• Create an account in heroku (for instance)
• Create a configuration variable called : TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN with token gotten in previous step.
• Push and save the public url of this heroku application.

Step 4 : Register bot in Telegram Servers

If your bot is deployed and has a url like:

• https://my_awesome_bot.herokuapp.com

You must register it, executing this:

curl -F "url=https://my_awesome_bot.herokuapp.com/new-message"  https://api.telegram.org/bot<your_api_token>/setWebhook

Step 5: Chat with your bot

If you followed all the steps without errors, you could use this command with your own bot:

If you don't have any response, check de logs or review the telegram father configurations.

Create new commands

• We will create a command who return the data of the current day
• Create a module inside of commands folder. The doit method is mandatory

function Today() {
  this.doit = (commandArguments, chatMessageObject) => {
    var today = new Date();
    return today.toISOString().substring(0, 10);
  }
}
module.exports = Today;

The framework will inject you two variables: (commandArguments, chatMessageObject) in the doit method

commandArguments

The parameters received with your command. If the chat was: /buy_coffee param1 param2, you will receive: param1 param2

chatMessageObject

The entire json sent by telegram bot internal engine:

{
  "message": {
    "from": {
      "id": 123456,
      "is_bot": false,
      "first_name": "JohnDoe",
      "last_name": "ENL",
      "username": "john_doe"
    },
    "chat": {
      "id": 87865786,
      "title": "My group or chat title",
      "type": "group"
    },
    "text": "/author param1 param2"
  }
}

You could use these variables for what you want to do with your bot command.

• That's all. Redeploy your bot and you will have a new command, ready to use it in the chat with /today

Road Map

• Emulate telegram service for local tests
• Add self webhook endpoint
• Add complex feature : receive images
• Add complex feature : receive form data
• Add complex feature : payments

Contributors

JRichardsz