This repo containts code for building a base telegram bot. Furthermore, on top of the base bot, you can add your own customization accordingly.
Detailed blog for the base bot and steps for hosting the same on Heroku can be found HERE.
All the required modules are listed under requirements.txt. Run the following command to install the same:
C:\> pip install -r requirements.txt
Create a new telegram chatbot using BotFather.
Then, create a .env file and add following variables
API_KEY = "here goes your access token from BotFather"
BOT_USER_NAME = "the username you entered"
URL = "the hosting link that we will create later"
app.py contains the complete code for base bot built using Flask. Additionally, we've used webhook which provides us a way of letting the bot call our server whenever a message is called, so that we don’t need to make our server suffer in a while loop waiting for a message to come.
Telegram can’t communicate with the localhost directly and hence we’ll need a public URL to communicate with the bot. Here, we’ll be using ngrok tunneling. ngrok is a free tool that allows us to tunnel from a public URL to our application running locally. You can download ngrok from here. Activate the ngrok tunnel using following command:
C:\> ngrok http 5000
Copy the https URL tunneled to localhost to the URL variable of .env file and Make sure you append / at the end of URL.
Now run the app.py file. Then copy the ngrok URL and add to the end of the link /setwebhook so that the address will be something like https://<ngrok code>.ngrok.io/setwebhook. If you see GET /set_webhook 200 OK on ngrok’s terminal, that means you are ready to go!
