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Sending yourself a notification with a Telegram bot

June 25, 2021

TL;DR: it’s easy to create a Telegram bot that can send yourself messages.

The context

I’ve been playing around the idea of automating a couple things recently, and one of the question was: how can I send myself notifications. When something happens (eg an ISS satellite will be visible, or more generally event x for which I have metrics is triggered), it may be interesting to have a notification on my smartphone.

Some options I considered:

I could use email, but it involves paying for a service or setting up an SMTP server… meh.
I could use SMS. The Twilio API is great, but I did not want to spend money nor to rely on an external company. I could self host something with a raspberry PI, but again self hosting has downsides (initial setup effort, maintenance) that I wanted to avoid.
I settled for Telegram. It’s free, secure, simple, perfect for my weekend project needs. My PoC took 30 minutes to setup and less than 30 lines of code in total.

The solution

We will:

create a Telegram bot
join a conversation with this bot
then use Telegram’s API in order to send a message to this conversation

Our small Telegram API client

In this minimalistic implementation we only need 2 endpoints. Yes it could be shorter, better or have better error handling, but that’s enough for a start.

# telegram_lib.py
import urllib.parse
import requests
import json

class TelegramBot:
    def __init__(self, bot_token, chat_id=None):
        self.bot_token = bot_token
        self.chat_id = chat_id

    def get_updates(self):
        url = f"https://api.telegram.org/bot{self.bot_token}/getUpdates"
        return json.loads(requests.get(url).content)

    def send_message(self, message):
        encoded_message = urllib.parse.quote_plus(message)
        url = f"https://api.telegram.org/bot{self.bot_token}/sendMessage?chat_id={self.chat_id}&parse_mode=Markdown&text={encoded_message}"
        return requests.get(url).status_code == 200

Creation of our bot

Install Telegram app
Add @BotFather
Send /newbot to @BotFather.

It will ask for a bot name and a username, and will reply with an access token that you should keep, and the telegram address of your bot.

You can now add your own bot ; You can find it using the username like this : @BotUsername, or with the previous adress.
Send /start to your bot.
You just subscribed to a conversation: now we’ll need to send an API request to our own bot in order to find its chat id. Here is the raw Json output:

{
    "ok": true,
    "result": [
        {
            "update_id": 1234,
            "message": {
                "message_id": 2,
                "from": {
                    "id": 123456,
                    "is_bot": false,
                    "first_name": "some first_name",
                    "language_code": "fr"
                },
                "chat": {
                    "id": 123456,
                    "first_name": "some first_name",
                    "type": "private"
                },
                "date": 1624625831,
                "text": "/start",
                "entities": [
                    {
                        "offset": 0,
                        "length": 6,
                        "type": "bot_command"
                    }
                ]
            }
        }
    ]
} 

You need the chat.id attribute. We can overengineer a program to extract this and test our API client:

# get_updates.py
from telegram_lib import TelegramBot
import json

bot = TelegramBot("your_token")

print(json.dumps(bot.get_updates()))

Lets run it and extract the message id with jq:

python get_updates.py | jq .result[0].message.chat.id
123456

Ok so 123456 is our chat id.

Sending messages to ourself through our bot

With the same logic it is possible to send a message:

# send_message.py
bot = TelegramBot("your_token", "your_conversation_id (eg 123456 we just found)")
bot.send_message("test !")

Now on my phone…

Going further

There are many more automation possibilities with bots, but that’s a start.
More about the API.
Telegrams a few code samples, tutorials and API wrappers.

KeiruaProd