Making our First Telegram Bot [Part -2]
In this story we will be discussing the ways of making a bot, and making a simple Bot for ourselves
How to make a Bot
Making a Telegram bot can be as easy as using a Bot Building bots on Telegram or by coding/scripting a Bot for ourselves which is preferable as it gives us a lot of flexibility for making a bot tailored for us.
Which programming Language to use?
You can make a bot in many different programming languages
A few of them are:
- PHP
- Node.js
- Rust
- Python
- Ruby
- Swift
- Kotlin
- Java
- Go
In this tutorial, we will be using Python and Specifically the python-telegram-bot library.
Pre-requisites
- A machine with Python 3.6 or higher installed
- A Text-Editor like VSCode, Atom or PyCharm
- A basic understanding of Python Programming Language
Coding/Scripting the Bot
Before we get started let’s get the required libraries installed
pip3 install python-telegram-bot
let’s import all the necessary libraries and add a basic logger
import logging
from telegram import Bot
from telegram.ext import Updater,CommandHandler
logging.basicConfig(
format='%(asctime)s - %(name)s - %(levelname)s - %(message)s', level=logging.INFO
)
logger = logging.getLogger()
If we want DEBUG
logs we can do the following
logger.setLevel(logging.DEBUG)
Now let's make a instance of Bot
in our program with our unique API_KEY
passed to it
TOKEN="<-YOUR TOKEN GOES HERE->"
bot = Bot(token=TOKEN)
We need handlers that will handle the commands and messages, the bot receives from the user, let us define all these handlers in the main
function, the MessageHandler
in our case accepts all text messages from the user andCommandHandler
accepts /start
command and responds to them.
def main():
updater=Updater(token=TOKEN,use_context=True)
dp = updater.dispatcher
dp.add_handler(CommandHandler('start',start_command))
dp.add_handler(MessageHandler(filters=Filters.text,callback=echo_message))
Let’s write the callback functions for the MessageHandler
and CommandHandler
namely echo_message
and start_command
def start_command(update,context):
user_id = update.effective_user.id
bot.send_message(chat_id=user_id,text="Hey there\nI'm blogtest19\n")
def echo_message(update,context):
user_id = update.effective_user.id
message = update.message
bot.send_message(chat_id=user_id,text=message)
In the above-mentioned code update
is an instance of Update
Class and the effective_user.id
attribute is the id of the user who generated the update in our case a message or a /start
Command
Now add the following lines to the main
function will enable our script to fetch the latest updates from the Telegram Servers with respect to our bot
updater.start_polling()
We can start the script by adding to make sure that the bot works only when this script, in particular, is run
if __name__ = "__main__":
main()
You can find this code on my Github Repository
Stay tuned for the next part of this series.