heroku-node-telegram-bot

Starter pack for running telegram bot on the Heroku using Node.js

Step-by-step

Try bot locally

1. Create your own bot using Telegram's BotFather and grab your TOKEN.
2. Clone or download and unpack this repo.
3. Go to the app's folder using cd ~/heroku-node-telegram-bot
4. Run npm install (in some cases you will need to run this with sudo, you know, just the permissions).
5. Rename .env_example file into .env and set TOKEN to the value, you've got from the BotFather.
6. Run npm start and send smth to your bot.
7. After it says "hello" to you, we can go to the next step😎

Deploy your bot to the heroku

1. Create the Heroku account and install the Heroku Toolbelt.
2. Login to your Heroku account using heroku login.
3. Go to the app's folder using cd ~/heroku-node-telegram-bot
4. Run heroku create to prepare the Heroku environment.
5. Run heroku config:set TOKEN=SET HERE THE TOKEN YOU'VE GOT FROM THE BOTFATHER and heroku config:set HEROKU_URL=$(heroku info -s | grep web_url | cut -d= -f2) to configure environment variables on the server.
6. Run git add -A && git commit -m "Ready to run on heroku" && git push heroku master to deploy your bot to the Heroku server.
7. Send smth to the bot to check out if it works ok.

Pro tip: use heroku config:set $(cat .env | xargs) to easily copy all your environment variables from .env to heroku app configuration

Download your app back from heroku to continue development

From Git Cloning Existing Heroku Applications

1. Run the following, replacing myapp with the name of your app.

heroku git:clone -a myapp

If you're not using Heroku for deployment (e.g. you deploy from GitHub), first clone the repo your preferred way (e.g. clone using GitHub Desktop). Then add a "heroku" remote to the repository configuration using the following command (replace myapp with the name of your app).

git remote add heroku https://git.heroku.com/myapp.git

After adding the remote, you will be able to use commands like heroku config without specifying your app name manually each time.

2. Copy production environment to your local machine

From Copy Heroku config vars to your local .env file

To copy one-by-one:

heroku config:get CONFIG-VAR-NAME -s  >> .env

To fully overwrite your local environment with heroku's one:

heroku config -s > .env

Going further

Now you may wish to add other functionality to your bot and here you can face some problems. The reason is that in development mode your bot works using polling and on the heroku server it uses the webhook, because heroku will shut down the web-server after a period of inactivity that will result in your polling loop to shut down too. Once webhook was enabled, telegram will return an error {"ok":false,"error_code":409,"description":"Error: Conflict: another webhook is active"} when you will try to use polling again, and it's actually ok.

To go back to development mode, you will need to run npm run switch_to_dev. This script will disable current webhook and start your local server. Don't be afraid - when you will finish with the changes you may simply push your bot to heroku using git push heroku master. Then you should restart your app using heroku restart. It will set the webhook again.

Possible OS issues

As i work on MacOS and sometimes on Ubuntu, you may face some problems with my npm scripts, so let's figure out how they work.

npm run switch_to_dev runs export $(cat .env | xargs) && wget --spider https://api.telegram.org/bot$TOKEN/setWebhook?url= --delete-after && node index.js which is actually an API call which will reset webhook (with the TOKEN from your environment variable) and npm start.

If wget don't work (or is not installed) on your OS, you can simply open the https://api.telegram.org/botYOUR_TOKEN/setWebhook?url= in your browser, but don't forget to replace YOUR_TOKEN with the token, you've got from the BotFather.

If your bot is not responding locally, in most cases, you will need to reset the environment variables by restarting your application.

Links and references

Actually, this repo is created because I've faced problems when I was trying to run the bot using mvalipour's article and this PR to his repo. Still, these links will be very useful for the beginners.

The solution relies on the node-telegram-bot-api wrapper by the @yagop, so you can find more info there.

Also check out official API docs by Telegram team, it may be helpfull.

Good luck, BotCoder!

P.S. If you see that something is not working, please, open an issue or send me a PR if you've managed to make code better.

Created with great passion for bots. In case of any bot development proposals, contact me here.