Telebot

Telebot is a convenient wrapper to Telegram Bots API, written in Golang.

Bots are special Telegram accounts designed to handle messages automatically. Users can interact with bots by sending them command messages in private or group chats. These accounts serve as an interface for code running somewhere on your server.

Telebot offers a convenient wrapper to Bots API, so you shouldn't even care about networking at all. You may install it with

go get github.com/tucnak/telebot

(after setting up your GOPATH properly).

Since you are probably hosting your bot in a public repository, we'll add an environment variable for the token in this example. Please set it with

export BOT_TOKEN=<your token here>

Here is an example "helloworld" bot, written with telebot:

package main

import (
    "log"
    "time"
    "os" 
    "github.com/tucnak/telebot"
)

func main() {
    bot, err := telebot.NewBot(os.Getenv("BOT_TOKEN"))
    if err != nil {
        log.Fatalln(err)
    }

    messages := make(chan telebot.Message)
    bot.Listen(messages, 1*time.Second)

    for message := range messages {
        if message.Text == "/hi" {
            bot.SendMessage(message.Chat,
                "Hello, "+message.Sender.FirstName+"!", nil)
        }
    }
}

Inline mode

As of January 4, 2016, Telegram added inline mode support for bots. Telebot support inline mode in a fancy manner. Here's a nice way to handle both incoming messages and inline queries:

package main

import (
    "log"
    "time"
    "os"
    "github.com/tucnak/telebot"
)

var bot *telebot.Bot

func main() {
    var err error
    bot, err = telebot.NewBot(os.Getenv("BOT_TOKEN"))
    if err != nil {
        log.Fatalln(err)
    }

    bot.Messages = make(chan telebot.Message, 1000)
    bot.Queries = make(chan telebot.Query, 1000)

    go messages()
    go queries()

    bot.Start(1 * time.Second)
}

func messages() {
    for message := range bot.Messages {
        log.Printf("Received a message from %s with the text: %s\n", message.Sender.Username, message.Text)
    }
}

func queries() {
    for query := range bot.Queries {
        log.Println("--- new query ---")
        log.Println("from:", query.From.Username)
        log.Println("text:", query.Text)

        // Create an article (a link) object to show in our results.
        article := &telebot.InlineQueryResultArticle{
            Title: "Telegram bot framework written in Go",
            URL:   "https://github.com/tucnak/telebot",
            InputMessageContent: &telebot.InputTextMessageContent{
                Text:           "Telebot is a convenient wrapper to Telegram Bots API, written in Golang.",
                DisablePreview: false,
            },
        }

        // Build the list of results. In this instance, just our 1 article from above.
        results := []telebot.InlineQueryResult{article}

        // Build a response object to answer the query.
        response := telebot.QueryResponse{
            Results:    results,
            IsPersonal: true,
        }

        // And finally send the response.
        if err := bot.AnswerInlineQuery(&query, &response); err != nil {
            log.Println("Failed to respond to query:", err)
        }
    }
}

Files

Telebot lets you upload files from the file system:

boom, err := telebot.NewFile("boom.ogg")
if err != nil {
    return err
}

audio := telebot.Audio{File: boom}

// Next time you send &audio, telebot won't issue
// an upload, but would re-use existing file.
err = bot.SendAudio(recipient, &audio, nil)

Reply markup

Sometimes you wanna send a little complicated messages with some optional parameters. The third argument of all Send* methods accepts telebot.SendOptions, capable of defining an advanced reply markup:

// Send a selective force reply message.
bot.SendMessage(user, "pong", &telebot.SendOptions{
        ReplyMarkup: telebot.ReplyMarkup{
            ForceReply: true,
            Selective: true,

			CustomKeyboard: [][]string{
				[]string{"1", "2", "3"},
				[]string{"4", "5", "6"},
				[]string{"7", "8", "9"},
				[]string{"*", "0", "#"},
			},
        },
    },
)