Telebot

"I never knew creating Telegram bots could be so sexy!"

go get -u gopkg.in/tucnak/telebot.v2

• Overview
• Getting Started
  • Poller
  • Commands
  • Files
  • Sendable
  • Editable
  • Keyboards
  • Inline mode
  • Poll
• Contributing
• Donate
• License

Overview

Telebot is a bot framework for Telegram Bot API. This package provides the best of its kind API for command routing, inline query requests and keyboards, as well as callbacks. Actually, I went a couple steps further, so instead of making a 1:1 API wrapper I chose to focus on the beauty of API and performance. Some of the strong sides of telebot are:

• Real concise API
• Command routing
• Middleware
• Transparent File API
• Effortless bot callbacks

All the methods of telebot API are extremely easy to memorize and get used to. Also, consider Telebot a highload-ready solution. I'll test and benchmark the most popular actions and if necessary, optimize against them without sacrificing API quality.

Getting Started

Let's take a look at the minimal telebot setup:

package main

import (
	"time"
	"log"

	tb "gopkg.in/tucnak/telebot.v2"
)

func main() {
	b, err := tb.NewBot(tb.Settings{
		Token:  "TOKEN_HERE",
		// You can also set custom API URL. If field is empty it equals to "https://api.telegram.org"
		URL: "http://195.129.111.17:8012",
		Poller: &tb.LongPoller{Timeout: 10 * time.Second},
	})

	if err != nil {
		log.Fatal(err)
		return
	}

	b.Handle("/hello", func(m *tb.Message) {
		b.Send(m.Sender, "hello world")
	})

	b.Start()
}

Simple, innit? Telebot's routing system takes care of delivering updates to their endpoints, so in order to get to handle any meaningful event, all you got to do is just plug your function to one of the Telebot-provided endpoints. You can find the full list here.

b, _ := tb.NewBot(settings)

b.Handle(tb.OnText, func(m *tb.Message) {
	// all the text messages that weren't
	// captured by existing handlers
})

b.Handle(tb.OnPhoto, func(m *tb.Message) {
	// photos only
})

b.Handle(tb.OnChannelPost, func (m *tb.Message) {
	// channel posts only
})

b.Handle(tb.Query, func (q *tb.Query) {
	// incoming inline queries
})

There's dozens of supported endpoints (see package consts). Let me know if you'd like to see some endpoint or endpoint idea implemented. This system is completely extensible, so I can introduce them without breaking backwards-compatibity.

Poller

Telebot doesn't really care how you provide it with incoming updates, as long as you set it up with a Poller:

// Poller is a provider of Updates.
//
// All pollers must implement Poll(), which accepts bot
// pointer and subscription channel and start polling
// synchronously straight away.
type Poller interface {
	// Poll is supposed to take the bot object
	// subscription channel and start polling
	// for Updates immediately.
	//
	// Poller must listen for stop constantly and close
	// it as soon as it's done polling.
	Poll(b *Bot, updates chan Update, stop chan struct{})
}

Telegram Bot API supports long polling and webhook integration. Poller means you can plug telebot into whatever existing bot infrastructure (load balancers?) you need, if you need to. Another great thing about pollers is that you can chain them, making some sort of middleware:

poller := &tb.LongPoller{Timeout: 15 * time.Second}
spamProtected := tb.NewMiddlewarePoller(poller, func(upd *tb.Update) bool {
	if upd.Message == nil {
		return true
	}

	if strings.Contains(upd.Message.Text, "spam") {
		return false
	}

	return true
})

bot, _ := tb.NewBot(tb.Settings{
	// ...
	Poller: spamProtected,
})

// graceful shutdown
go func() {
	<-time.After(N * time.Second)
	bot.Stop()
})()

bot.Start() // blocks until shutdown

fmt.Println(poller.LastUpdateID) // 134237

Commands

When handling commands, Telebot supports both direct (/command) and group-like syntax (/command@botname) and will never deliver messages addressed to some other bot, even if privacy mode is off. For simplified deep-linking, telebot also extracts payload:

// Command: /start <PAYLOAD>
b.Handle("/start", func(m *tb.Message) {
	if !m.Private() {
		return
	}

	fmt.Println(m.Payload) // <PAYLOAD>
})

Files

Telegram allows files up to 20 MB in size.

Telebot allows to both upload (from disk / by URL) and download (from Telegram) and files in bot's scope. Also, sending any kind of media with a File created from disk will upload the file to Telegram automatically:

a := &tb.Audio{File: tb.FromDisk("file.ogg")}

fmt.Println(a.OnDisk()) // true
fmt.Println(a.InCloud()) // false

// Will upload the file from disk and send it to recipient
bot.Send(recipient, a)

// Next time you'll be sending this very *Audio, Telebot won't
// re-upload the same file but rather utilize its Telegram FileID
bot.Send(otherRecipient, a)

fmt.Println(a.OnDisk()) // true
fmt.Println(a.InCloud()) // true
fmt.Println(a.FileID) // <telegram file id: ABC-DEF1234ghIkl-zyx57W2v1u123ew11>

You might want to save certain Files in order to avoid re-uploading. Feel free to marshal them into whatever format, File only contain public fields, so no data will ever be lost.

Sendable

Send is undoubtedly the most important method in Telebot. Send() accepts a Recipient (could be user, group or a channel) and a Sendable. Other types other than the telebot-provided media types (Photo, Audio, Video, etc.) are Sendable. If you create composite types of your own, and they satisfy the Sendable interface, Telebot will be able to send them out.

// Sendable is any object that can send itself.
//
// This is pretty cool, since it lets bots implement
// custom Sendables for complex kinds of media or
// chat objects spanning across multiple messages.
type Sendable interface {
    Send(*Bot, Recipient, *SendOptions) (*Message, error)
}

The only type at the time that doesn't fit Send() is Album and there is a reason for that. Albums were added not so long ago, so they are slightly quirky for backwards compatibilities sake. In fact, an Album can be sent, but never received. Instead, Telegram returns a []Message, one for each media object in the album:

p := &tb.Photo{File: tb.FromDisk("chicken.jpg")}
v := &tb.Video{File: tb.FromURL("http://video.mp4")}

msgs, err := b.SendAlbum(user, tb.Album{p, v})

Send options

Send options are objects and flags you can pass to Send(), Edit() and friends as optional arguments (following the recipient and the text/media). The most important one is called SendOptions, it lets you control all the properties of the message supported by Telegram. The only drawback is that it's rather inconvenient to use at times, so Send() supports multiple shorthands:

// regular send options
b.Send(user, "text", &tb.SendOptions{
	// ...
})

// ReplyMarkup is a part of SendOptions,
// but often it's the only option you need
b.Send(user, "text", &tb.ReplyMarkup{
	// ...
})

// flags: no notification && no web link preview
b.Send(user, "text", tb.Silent, tb.NoPreview)

Full list of supported option-flags you can find here.

Editable

If you want to edit some existing message, you don't really need to store the original *Message object. In fact, upon edit, Telegram only requires chat_id and message_id. So you don't really need the Message as the whole. Also you might want to store references to certain messages in the database, so I thought it made sense for any Go struct to be editable as a Telegram message, to implement Editable:

// Editable is an interface for all objects that
// provide "message signature", a pair of 32-bit
// message ID and 64-bit chat ID, both required
// for edit operations.
//
// Use case: DB model struct for messages to-be
// edited with, say two collums: msg_id,chat_id
// could easily implement MessageSig() making
// instances of stored messages editable.
type Editable interface {
	// MessageSig is a "message signature".
	//
	// For inline messages, return chatID = 0.
	MessageSig() (messageID int, chatID int64)
}

For example, Message type is Editable. Here is the implementation of StoredMessage type, provided by telebot:

// StoredMessage is an example struct suitable for being
// stored in the database as-is or being embedded into
// a larger struct, which is often the case (you might
// want to store some metadata alongside, or might not.)
type StoredMessage struct {
	MessageID int   `sql:"message_id" json:"message_id"`
	ChatID    int64 `sql:"chat_id" json:"chat_id"`
}

func (x StoredMessage) MessageSig() (int, int64) {
	return x.MessageID, x.ChatID
}

Why bother at all? Well, it allows you to do things like this:

// just two integer columns in the database
var msgs []tb.StoredMessage
db.Find(&msgs) // gorm syntax

for _, msg := range msgs {
	bot.Edit(&msg, "Updated text.")
	// or
	bot.Delete(&msg)
}

I find it incredibly neat. Worth noting, at this point of time there exists another method in the Edit family, EditCaption() which is of a pretty rare use, so I didn't bother including it to Edit(), just like I did with SendAlbum() as it would inevitably lead to unnecessary complications.

var m *Message

// change caption of a photo, audio, etc.
bot.EditCaption(m, "new caption")

Keyboards

Telebot supports both kinds of keyboards Telegram provides: reply and inline keyboards. Any button can also act as an endpoints for Handle():

func main() {
	b, _ := tb.NewBot(tb.Settings{...})

	// This button will be displayed in the user's
	// reply keyboard.
	replyBtn := tb.ReplyButton{Text: "🌕 Button #1"}
	replyKeys := [][]tb.ReplyButton{
		[]tb.ReplyButton{replyBtn},
		// ...
	}

	// And this one — just under the message itself.
	// Pressing it will cause the client to send
	// the bot a callback.
	//
	// Make sure Unique stays unique as per button _kind_,
	// as it has to be for callback routing to work.
	//
	// Then differentiate with the callback data.
	inlineBtn := tb.InlineButton{
		Unique: "sad_moon",
		Text: "🌚 Button #2",
	}
	inlineKeys := [][]tb.InlineButton{
		[]tb.InlineButton{inlineBtn},
		// ...
	}

	b.Handle(&replyBtn, func(m *tb.Message) {
		// on reply button pressed
	})

	b.Handle(&inlineBtn, func(c *tb.Callback) {
		// on inline button pressed (callback!)

		// always respond!
		b.Respond(c, &tb.CallbackResponse{...})
	})

	// Command: /start <PAYLOAD>
	b.Handle("/start", func(m *tb.Message) {
		if !m.Private() {
			return
		}

		// Telegram does not support messages with both reply
		// and inline keyboard in them.
		// 
		// Choose one or the other.
		b.Send(m.Sender, "Hello!", &tb.ReplyMarkup{
			ReplyKeyboard:  replyKeys,
			// or
			InlineKeyboard: inlineKeys,
		})
	})

	b.Start()
}

Inline mode

So if you want to handle incoming inline queries you better plug the tb.OnQuery endpoint and then use the Answer() method to send a list of inline queries back. I think at the time of writing, telebot supports all of the provided result types (but not the cached ones). This is how it looks like:

b.Handle(tb.OnQuery, func(q *tb.Query) {
	urls := []string{
		"http://photo.jpg",
		"http://photo2.jpg",
	}

	results := make(tb.Results, len(urls)) // []tb.Result
	for i, url := range urls {
		result := &tb.PhotoResult{
			URL: url,

			// required for photos
			ThumbURL: url,
		}

		results[i] = result
		results[i].SetResultID(strconv.Itoa(i)) // needed to set a unique string ID for each result
	}

	err := b.Answer(q, &tb.QueryResponse{
		Results: results,
		CacheTime: 60, // a minute
	})

	if err != nil {
		fmt.Println(err)
	}
})

There's not much to talk about really. It also supports some form of authentication through deep-linking. For that, use fields SwitchPMText and SwitchPMParameter of QueryResponse.

Poll

Creating polls is just as easy. You just need to create an object and use the Send method. You can also use the AddAnswers method instead of explicitly specifying a slice of answers to a question and without append.

poll := &tb.Poll{
    Question:    "my question",
    Type:        "regular",
    IsClosed:    false,
    IsAnonymous: true,
}
poll.AddAnswers("answer 1", "answer 2")

b.Send(m.Sender, poll)

Contributing

1. Fork it
2. Clone it: git clone https://github.com/tucnak/telebot
3. Create your feature branch: git checkout -b my-new-feature
4. Make changes and add them: git add .
5. Commit: git commit -m 'Add some feature'
6. Push: git push origin my-new-feature
7. Pull request

Donate

I do coding for fun but I also try to search for interesting solutions and optimize them as much as possible. If you feel like it's a good piece of software, I wouldn't mind a tip!

Bitcoin: 1DkfrFvSRqgBnBuxv9BzAz83dqur5zrdTH

License

Telebot is distributed under MIT.