Simple Push Notification Bot for Telegram

This setups a simple webhook that can be used by a Telegram Bot to send messages and is easily deployed to Fly.io. This can useful to send messages from CLI, APIs, crons, etc.

Setup

1) Create a Telegram Bot

If you haven't created a Telegram account yet, go ahead and do that. Then you can create a bot by following the steps below; for me details checkout the Telegram Bot documentation.

1. Open a chat with @botfather
2. Create your bot with /newbot
3. Grab your Auth Token, it should look something like 110201543:AAHdqTcvCH1vGWJxfSeofSAs0K5PALDsaw. You'll need to add this as a secret in Fly.io.
4. Use /setcommands to create a new /chat command. chat - Get your unique Chat ID should be good enough.
5. (OPTIONAL) You can disable allowing the bot to join groups with /setjoingroups

2) Create a Fly.io App

Since this repo includes a Dockerfile, it's very simply to create a new Fly.io app. You'll only need to install the flyctl command-line utility.

Once it's installed, you simply have to run fly launch and walk through the prompts on screen to setup the new app. You'll also need to set the AUTH and SECRET secret.

• AUTH is the auth token from Telegram for the first step.
• SECRET is used to prevent unwated access to your Fly.io app.

Finally, you can run fly deploy -a <FLY_APP_NAME> --remote-only to deploy a new release for your Fly.io app not even requiring you to have Docker installed locally.

3) Create a Webhook

You'll need the authentication token and secret for your Bot.

curl --request POST \
  --url https://api.telegram.org/bot<token>/setWebhook \
  --header 'content-type: application/json' \
  --data '{
    "url": "https://<YOUR_PUBLIC_FLY_APP>/<YOUR_SECRET>",
    "max_connections": "20",
    "allowed_updates": ["message"]
}'

4) Get your Chat ID

1. Open a chat with your bot and send the /chat command. You'll get a message back with your unique chat ID. This will be used to send messages from the bot.

Usage

To send a message you just need your chat_id.

curl --request POST \
  --url https://<YOUR_PUBLIC_FLY_APP>/<YOUR_SECRET>/<CHAT_ID> \
  --header 'content-type: application/json' \
  --data '{ "message": "<YOUR_MESSAGE_TEXT>" }'