Telegram Bot Development

For technical and non-technical problems I encounter, besides writing blog summaries, I often record them as GitHub issues in alanhg/others-note and alanhg/coding-note. Searching across repos is inefficient, so I decided to build a Telegram Bot to search issues across repos. I didn’t find an existing solution, so I implemented one myself.

Current Result

Use the repoadd command to add target repositories, then enter any keyword to search issues across multiple repos. Demo:

Bot link: GitHub Issue Bot

Bot Development

I hit a few bumps while building the bot; here’s a summary:

1. Create the bot with @BotFather and follow the interactive setup.

   • Configure bot name/avatar and command list in BotFather.
   • Keep the bot_token safe; it identifies your bot and authorizes messaging.
   • To create a command list, use BotFather’s “Edit Commands” for the target bot. Notes:
     • Avoid hyphens in command names.
     • Don’t include a leading / in the definition; the slash is only for invocation.

       

     • You can’t add commands incrementally; enter the full set each time.

2. There are solid helper libraries to get started.

   • For Node.js, use node-telegram-bot-api.

3. Bots support markdown/html message formats, which simplifies layout.

4. To update a “searching…” message with results, use bot.editMessageText with explicit message_id and chat_id.

5. To listen for replies to a specific message, use bot.onReplyToMessage.

6. Deploy the bot on a publicly reachable host; you may also need a proxy during testing.

Final Thoughts

With this bot, I can simply enter a keyword to check for similar issues across repos.

References

• https://github.com/yagop/node-telegram-bot-api