PHP Telegram Bot

Minimal bot example

minimal_tg_bot_example.php is a fully functional Telegram bot written in PHP with a single example command. Leaving it here solely because a file like this would have helped me when I started to make a bot from scratch, so hopefully it will help someone else. To make the file function as a bot in Telegram, see Setup.

Regular bot example

The rest of the files in this repository represent a fully functional, rationally structured (imo easy to understand) bot written in PHP. Note that this bot uses flat files (in logs/ dir) instead of a database for all features that require logging or saving data of any kind.

• All the important settings and commands are listed neatly in index.php.
• Code of each command (when needed) is listed in, and included from, commands/ dir.
• sys_gpt.php contains the necessities to utilize GPT3 or GPT4 (chatGPT). I think it currently does not contain e.g. remembering past convos – will add that later.
• sys_global_functions.php contains all the necessary PHP functions.
• Localization can be found in sys_locale.php – it is perhaps not the best way to do localization out there, but it works as long as your bot has one main language.

Setup

Whether you use just minimal_tg_bot_example.php or the whole repository, you must setup your bot as follows:

1. Create a new bot in Telegram using @BotFather (Telegram's own official bot for that purpose).
2. @BotFather will provide you a token. Place token in the PHP file.
3. Place PHP file on a public server.
4. Set write permission to logs dir (i.e. chown -R www-data:www-data logs) if you want to enable features and commands that require any kind of logging.
5. In the URL below, replace {my_bot_token} with your token, {url_to_this_PHP_file} with the URL to the PHP file located on your server (index.php or even_simpler.php from this repo) and just open the full URL in your browser:

https://api.telegram.org/bot{my_bot_token}/setWebhook?url={url_to_this_PHP_file}/