Sending messages with Telegram bot
#bots#telegram#http
Rajitha Gunathilake

Rajitha Gunathilake @rizkyrajitha

About: #FearHeWhoFearsNothing...

Location:
sri lanka
Joined:
Oct 11, 2019

Sending messages with Telegram bot

Publish Date: Nov 10 '19
71 45

Hi everyone,

In this tutorial, we’re going to build a telegram bot ,and send messages to a group with a simple HTTP request.

to get start lets create a new telegram bot with, it's own API Botfather.

One Bot To Rule Them All

so go to telegram app on your phone, or log in with telegram web

and then search for bot father.
create a new bot /newbot

create new bot

now follow along with instructions.

type a name for your bot
I had a hard time finding a username 😆

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now you'll get a token to authenticate with your bot.
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keep the access token securely. Anyone with access token can manipulate your bot

alright, now we have the access token. The next question is how to send messages with the bot.

we will create a group with our bot. And then our bot will massage to that group

it's simple as that😎

now let's create a new group in telegram and add the bot to that group.

search with the username of your bot

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add our bot to the group

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after adding give admin permission to our bot, to give access to the bot to send messages to the group (not all the permissions are necessary but I will give because this is a demo group and nothing harmful will happen ).

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now everything is set in this end.

The next thing we need is to get our group chat id to send messages to the group.

to get it we need to interact with the telegram API.

i hope yall have postman📬 ready. if not you can download postman , since it is a useful tool in web dev.
or alternatively, you can use postwoman which is a great way to build requests online.

before we sending requests, make sure to send some messages to our newly created group.

after that let's fire up postman

send a POST request to the following telegram API endpoint.

replace with your access token we previously got from bot father

https://api.telegram.org/bot<token>/getUpdates

and Send.

if you get something like this, try few more times. I don't know the exact cause, but it sometimes returns empty arrays.(make sure you have some messages in the group)

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hopefully, you'll receive something similar to this.

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from here what we want is the chat id that starts with -

this is the group chat id of our group.

after that, the only thing left is to send messages.

so to send messages to our group.

use the following API endpoint

https://api.telegram.org/bot<token>/sendMessage?chat_id=<group chat id >&text=<our text>

keep in mind that text should be URL Encoding String

ex - Hello%20World (spaces is replaced with %20)

checkout w3school for more info

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and wubba lubba dub dub your message is sent

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This is a great way to monitor and notify your apps state. I use this for the backend of my web apps to report errors. you can also use it with frontends, CLI applications regardless of the language. you can use this creatively to do many things because this needs no 3rd party libraries or dependencies, just a simple HTTP request will do the work.

Thanks for following along with me 🙌

what are your plans ? 💭

share them in the comments section.

I'd love to hear your feedback!

Comments 45 total

  • Eugene Karataev
    Eugene KarataevDec 19, 2019

    Thanks for the tutorial.
    In my case for some reason POST and GET requests to https://api.telegram.org/bot<token>/getUpdates in Postman failed, but GET request in the browser to this endpoint was successfull.

    • Rajitha Gunathilake
      Rajitha GunathilakeDec 19, 2019

      That's interesting .
      Thanks for sharing 👍

    • Tech2Blog.com
      Tech2Blog.comDec 23, 2019

      Try to add the bot to the group and then try the command.

      • Eugene Karataev
        Eugene KarataevDec 24, 2019

        The bot was in the group, but the request in Postman failed 🤷‍♀️

        • Tech2Blog.com
          Tech2Blog.comDec 24, 2019

          Strange, mine was also failing, but after adding to the group issue was resolved. Just check if the bot has admin privilege.

          Also, try with curl once.

          • Eugene Karataev
            Eugene KarataevDec 24, 2019

            Oh, I think I figured out the difference in results between Postman and browser requests.
            Telegram servers are blocked here in Russia, that's why Postman requests fail. But in the browser I use VPN extension and the request resolves as expected.
            Thanks for your help 😉

            • Rajitha Gunathilake
              Rajitha GunathilakeDec 24, 2019

              wow , that's some serious debugging.
              for me the results came after i added the bot to the group and then i send some messages to the group. so there is some data to show.

              • Eugene Karataev
                Eugene KarataevDec 24, 2019

                Yeah, but in normal situation even if you don't add the bot to the group and send request https://api.telegram.org/bot<token>/getUpdates, you'll get an emtpy response like {"ok":true,"result":[]}.
                In the case of access restriction on a government level, there is no response in Postman at all.
                no response

  • Garegin
    GareginFeb 22, 2020

    That was very useful for me. Thanks, Rajitha!

  • Creamy Uprising!
    Creamy Uprising!May 2, 2020

    Hi can i send a message to an individual rather than a group please

  • shoxruxmirzo
    shoxruxmirzoJun 13, 2020

    Using Telegram bot framework can be good idea, since you should not implement classes or more scripts.

  • glitchX
    glitchXJul 16, 2020

    How can Bot send rich messages like the text in bold or italic or some sort of option buttons

  • Manuel Ernesto
    Manuel ErnestoJul 24, 2020

    Thanks for the tutorial very helpfully. I'm working in a bot to make a web crawler and send notifications to a community. Regards from Cuba.

  • kishag212
    kishag212Oct 27, 2020

    I want to send a message to a group as soon as the chat opens

  • danu
    danuJan 7, 2021

    Thanks for the tutorial! It's very easy to follow.

  • Guillelerial
    GuillelerialJan 24, 2021

    Great tutorial. I was able to reproduce it for both a group and a channel following the same steps. However I did find it compulsory to have sent at least 1 message to the said group or channel in order to receive the bot's update message with the ID of the group/channel

    • Rajitha Gunathilake
      Rajitha GunathilakeJan 25, 2021

      Thanks 🙌.
      yeah when the group is empty we just get an empty array

  • yusufsonmez
    yusufsonmezFeb 3, 2021

    Thanks for the tutorial

  • Yaroslav Shmarov
    Yaroslav ShmarovFeb 14, 2021

    Good intro article.
    However:

    • You don't have to sign up to any service like Postman in to send API requests. You can do it directly in the browser
    • If you subscribed a bot to a group and can't get the bot ID, unsubscribe and subscribe again to make it work
  • Duvvuri Sandeep
    Duvvuri SandeepMay 3, 2021

    Telegram bot (my_bot messages not visible to others)

    Sir, I have created Telegram bot(my_bot). I am getting project notifications in my mobile. When i asked other employee to install Telegram and add my_bot. He didn't get any notifications similar as mine. Its blank whereas I get project notifications.
    Even I added the bot in new group and also added employee.
    Still the same problem. Can you please find out where I have done mistake.

    • Rajitha Gunathilake
      Rajitha GunathilakeMay 3, 2021

      hi Duvvuri Sandeep ,
      this is quiet uncommon , i use this method recently and works fine.
      can you make sure bot permissions are correctly set(admin permissions) .

      and also make sure the group id (starts with "-" ) is also correct.

  • prasaath
    prasaathJul 20, 2021

    By using php I wrote the code
    Please review the link below
    knowsomething.online/how-to-send-a...

    • Rajitha Gunathilake
      Rajitha GunathilakeJul 20, 2021

      hi prasaath ,
      i don't have expertise in php to review this kind of an article😶.

  • stevehan12
    stevehan12Sep 13, 2021

    hi,I wanna know how about this situation:we input "api.telegram.org/bot/sendmessage?chat_id=&text=test1" in broswer,I know the chat_id will get the content"test1",but how can I get the content "test1" by another broswer url code link or php/java code.

  • smsdavis
    smsdavisDec 14, 2021

    Ok. I followed all these steps and I cannot make this work. Maybe I don't understand. Please help.

    I want to create a simple bot where I can send messages to a specific Telegram group (my family) and do so from a URL (so I can do it from within another app).

    I created the bot, got the token, found the chat ID of the group I want the posts to go into and put in all the information and I get an error not found.

    Your instructions say to create a bot THEN create a group. I already have a group chat. I added the bot into that group chat. But that bot has nothing else. It was just created and has a name. Am I missing something here? How do you get the new bot to be able to post messages into the group? I cannot create a new group as the group already exists.

    Please explain. Thank you.

    • Rajitha Gunathilake
      Rajitha GunathilakeDec 14, 2021

      Existing group is fine you don't have to create a new group .
      can you post the error you got.

  • arsaaron
    arsaaronJan 12, 2022

    i have error : Bad Request: chat not found

  • arsaaron
    arsaaronJan 12, 2022

    i have error 400 Bad Request: chat not found

    • Rajitha Gunathilake
      Rajitha GunathilakeJan 12, 2022

      as the error suggest , check whether you are using the correct chat id
      and also make sure - before the chat id .

  • encryptblockr
    encryptblockrJul 24, 2022

    next time use real token and just delete; common sense man. first it is demo account yet you still can't add to tutorial? second you can always delete the token after done with tutorial. why is this difficult for people to grasp? i see everyone keep doing this like common sense is becoming rare?

  • SinghAnupam04
    SinghAnupam04Sep 20, 2022

    Thank you so much brother for this amazing blog, I tried everything and it went perfectly. I'm able to send messages in my group through bot.

    But I have a question...
    Can I send a reply to a message in my group through bot using this method....????

  • Antonov Mike
    Antonov MikeOct 19, 2022

    Hi, thank you for this tutorial. Do you know how to make bot sending message any time user joins chat? Text message or button or kinda menu

  • Santosh
    SantoshSep 28, 2023

    Thanks for the step by step instructions.

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