Botmaster-telegram

This is the Telegram integration for botmaster. It allows you to use your botmaster bot on Telegram.

This package works with botmaster v3;

Botmaster is a lightweight chatbot framework. Its purpose is to integrate your existing chatbot into a variety of messaging channels.

Documentation

Find the whole documentation for the framework on: http://botmasterai.com/documentation.latest

Installing

yarn add botmaster-telegram

or

npm install --save botmaster-telegram

Credentials

All you need here is an authToken. In order to get one, you will need to either create a new bot on telegram.

Basically, you'll need to send a /newbot command(message) to Botfather (go talk to him here). Once you're done with giving it a name and a username, BotFather will come back to you with your authToken. Make sure to store it somewhere. More info on BotFather can be found here if needed.

For more on Telegram, you can find the telegram api docs here

Webhooks

Setting up your webhook requires you to make the following request outside of Botmaster (using curl for instance or a browser):

https://api.telegram.org/bot<authToken>/setWebhook?url=<'Your Base URL'>/telegram/webhook1234

Because Telegram doesn't send any type of information to verify the identity of the origin of the update, it is highly recommended that you include a sort of hash in your webhookEndpoint. I.e., rather than having this: webhookEndpoint: '/webhook/', do something more like this: webhookEndpoint: '/webhook92ywrnc9qm4qoiuthecvasdf42FG/'. This will assure that you know where the request is coming from.

If you are not too sure how webhooks work and/or how to get them to run locally, go to webhooks to read some more.

Code

const Botmaster = require('botmaster');
const TelegramBot = require('botmaster-telegram');
const botmaster = new Botmaster();
 
const telegramSettings = {
  credentials: {
    authToken: 'YOUR authToken',
  },
  webhookEndpoint: '/webhook1234/',
};
 
const telegramBot = new TelegramBot(telegramSettings);
botmaster.addBot(telegramBot);
 
botmaster.use({
  type: 'incoming',
  name: 'my-middleware',
  controller: (bot, update) => {
    return bot.reply(update, 'Hello world!');
  }
});

Note on attachment types and conversions

Attachment type conversion works as such for Telegram:

Telegram Type	Botmaster conversion
audio	audio
voice	audio
photo	image
video	video
location	location
venue	location

contact attachment types aren't supported in Messenger. So in order to deal with them in Botmaster, you will have to look into your update.raw object which is the standard Telegram update. You will find your contact object in update.raw.contact.

Also, concerning location and venue attachments. The url received in Botmaster for Telegram is a google maps one with the coordinates as query parameters. It looks something like this: https://maps.google.com/?q=<lat>,<long>

A few of you will want to use attachments with your socket.io bots. Because the Botmaster message standard is the Facebook Messenger one, everything is URL based. Which means it is left to the developer to store both incoming and outgoing attachments.

License

This library is licensed under the MIT license