Funny Telegram Bot

Required

• You'll need a Telegram user account before you can create a Telegram bot. Head over to Telegram and create an account if you don't already have one.

Register a Telegram bot

Signed in to Telegram, search for BotFather (a bot for managing all other Telegram bots) and start a new chat with it. Follow the steps below to register a new bot with the BotFather:

• Type /start and press send.
• Type /newbot and press send.
• Choose a name for your bot.
• Choose a username for your bot that ends in bot (e.g: yourusernamebot).
• Type your bot name and bot username (bot username require suffix bot, e.g: yourusernamebot).

The BotFather will respond with a message containing an access token for your newly created bot. This access token will allow our application to access the Telegram API and tell our bot what to do when receiving different messages from users.

Set environment variables

• Create a .env file in the root of the project. You can clone the .env.example file and rename it to .env.
• Set the BOT_TOKEN variable to the access token you received from the BotFather.

Install dependencies

Install dependencies with yarn:

yarn install

If you don't have yarn installed, you can install it with npm:

npm install -g yarn

Start ngrok tunnel

Start ngrok tunnel on port 9090 (default port for this project, you can change it in server.js):

ngrok http 9090

If you want a custom subdomain of ngrok, you can use --domain option:

ngrok http --domain=yourdomain 9090

If you haven't installed ngrok, you can download it here or install it with some package manager like Homebrew:

brew install ngrok

or Chocolatey:

choco install ngrok

or if you are using Linux:

sudo snap install ngrok

Set webhook

Don't forget to set webhook for your bot. You can do it easily with setWebhook via an url:

https://api.telegram.org/bot<YOUR_BOT_TOKEN>/setWebhook?url=<YOUR_NGROK_URL>

Start bot

So, you can start the bot with yarn:

yarn start

Advanced: Set commands for your bot

You can set commands for your bot on BotFather:

/setcommands

And then, choose your bot and set commands.

Then, you can set commands like this:

command1 - Description for command1
command2 - Description for command2