Ever since Telegram introduced bots in 2015, other messengers have added bots to their own platforms. But Telegram's extensive bot API and the freedom it offers the developer keep it at an edge ahead of its competitors.

Lately, businesses have begun to adopt Telegram's bot platform to build completely separate apps that can do virtually anything within the bot framework.

How bots work

In order to be able to get updates from Telegram, you need a token. All the updates and the interactions with your bot gets stored in Telegram and you can get them by sending a request to this URL with that token.

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

The Bot API is an HTTP-based interface created for developers keen on building bots for Telegram.

Getting started

First of all, go ahead and create your bot with BotFather - which is a bot by itself. Now you have the token and can get updates from Telegram. Let's get some info from Telegram so we can make sure our bot works.

Replace the URL above with your token and a method from Telegram's Bot API. Let's use getMe method.

https://api.telegram.org/bot<token>/getMe // --> {"ok":true,"result":{"id":437852999,"is_bot":true,"first_name":"Reddit Bot","username":"SimpleReddit_Bot"}}

Well done. But how do we do this in NodeJS? It's basically the same. Every time we need an update we send a request to that URL with our desired method.

But the whole process of doing this would be frustrating, so we have handy frameworks for this. They handle everything and let us focus on what's important. There are some good frameworks available for NodeJS, in this tutorial we're going to use Telegraf.

Start coding

Initialize the project and install Telegraf:

npm init

npm install telegraf --save

Now let's add it to our script and make a simple bot:

const Telegraf = require('telegraf'); const app = new Telegraf(YOUR_TOKEN_HERE); app.hears('hi', ctx => { return ctx.reply('Hey!'); }); app.startPolling();

What's going on? Telegraf has it's own methods to handle most of the work for us. We can use this method to respond to a user's message:

Reddit bot

Let's take an example. We're going to send the top post of the subreddit that a user asks for. Install axios library to simplify sending GET requests and grabbing data from Reddit.

npm install axios --save

const axios = require('axios'); // add axios // handle the reaction everytime user sends a text message app.on('text', ctx => { // ctx object holds the Update object from Telegram API // So you can use everything you see there // get the text message sent by user const subreddit = ctx.message.text; // GET the data from Reddit API axios .get(`https://reddit.com/r/${subreddit}/top.json?limit=10`) .then(res => { // data recieved from Reddit const data = res.data.data; // if subbreddit does not exist if (data.children.length < 1) return ctx.reply("The subreddit couldn't be found."); // send the first top post link to the user const link = `https://reddit.com/${data.children[0].data.permalink}`; return ctx.reply(link); }) // if there's any error in request .catch(err => console.log(err)); });

When a user sends a subreddit name, we're going to grab the top post of that subreddit and send its link to them. Simple, huh?

Saving state

Imagine users want other options such as top, hot and new. We need to store the latest command they used to be able to respond correctly. Note that we use command method instead of on.

You can create commands on a Telegram bot. Commands start with '/' and are clickable. To add commands to your bot, message BotFather.

let state = {}; app.command('top', ctx => { const userId = ctx.message.from.id; // if user id does not exist create one if (!state[userId]) state[userId] = { id: userId }; // save/update user last command state[userId].command = 'top'; return ctx.replyWithMarkdown(`Enter a subreddit name to get *top* posts.`); }); app.command('hot', ctx => { const userId = ctx.message.from.id; if (!state[userId]) state[userId] = { id: userId }; state[userId].command = 'hot'; return ctx.replyWithMarkdown('Enter a subreddit name to get *hot* posts.'); });

Now we can send the proper post based on filter. In our text response:

const userId = ctx.message.from.id; // check if state and command exists and set defaults const type = !state[userId] ? 'top' : state[userId].command ? state[userId].command : 'top'; axios .get(`https://reddit.com/r/${subreddit}/${type}.json?limit=10`) .then(res => [ // do stuff ]);

Inline buttons

Telegram bots have interactive buttons called InlineKeyboardMarkup. We're going to add a next button, so the user can get the next post in that category.

We need to extract the specific methods for buttons from Telegraf in order to work with them:

const { Markup } = require('telegraf');

First, let's add the current post number to the state. Every time a user asks for a subreddit we need to set index to 0. In our text method:

if (!state[userId]) state[userId] = {}; state[userId].index = 0;

Instead of sending plain text, we send it with an inline button in the axios response:

// old response, only text return ctx.reply(link); // new response, with inline buttons return ctx.reply( link, Markup.inlineKeyboard([ // first argument is button's text // second argument is callback text Markup.callbackButton('➡️ Next', subreddit), ]).extra(), );

We can handle the callback with on method, but this time, the update method is callback_query:

app.on('callback_query', ctx => { // get info from callback_query object const subreddit = ctx.update.callback_query.data; const userId = ctx.update.callback_query.from.id; // check if user state and its properties exist let type; let index; try { type = state[userId].command ? state[userId].command : 'top'; index = state[userId].index; } catch (err) { return ctx.reply('Send a subreddit name.'); } // reply with a popup to callback ctx.answerCallbackQuery('Wait...'); axios .get(`https://reddit.com/r/${subreddit}/${type}.json?limit=10`) .then(res => { const data = res.data.data; // check if next one exists if (!data.children[index + 1]) return ctx.reply('No more posts!'); // send next link and update the user state with new index const link = `https://reddit.com/${ data.children[index + 1].data.permalink }`; state[userId].index = state[userId].index + 1; return ctx.reply( link, Markup.inlineKeyboard([ Markup.callbackButton('➡️ Next', subreddit), ]).extra(), ); }) .catch(err => console.log(err)); });

Wrapping up

As you can see, we've created a simple Telegram bot in minutes. Creating bots in Telegram easy, but it doesn't stop here. There are a lot of more stuff you can do with them—such as sending photos, videos, documents etc.

Imagine all the things you can do with Telegram's huge API which continuously gets better with each update.

You can find the source code of this bot on GitHub. Here is a more complex Reddit bot I've created, which uses more bot features such as sending photos and inline buttons.