TelegramNotificationBot

This library provides a thin layer on top of Telegram’s bot API. It frees you from the nasty things like keeping track of the known chat_id (= subscribed users). Basic understanding how the bot API works is still required.

You can use it for broadcasting news extracted from a RSS feed to different chats (channels). It uses a SQLite database (others may work, just change the SQLite DSN in the PDO constructor) to persist some data. If the bot is removed from group chats, received a /stop command or blocked by users it will remove those chat_ids from the database.

Usage hints:

1. install library:
   • install via Composer: composer require juliuspc/telegram-notification-bot
   • clone or download this repo, use composer install to install dependencies
2. obtain bot access token
3. write your code using this library

Importing the library in case of manual install...

require __DIR__ . '/TelegramBot.php';
use JuliusPC\TelegramBot;

... or simply using Composer:

require __DIR__ . '/vendor/autoload.php';
use JuliusPC\TelegramBot;

Configuring the bot:

$dbh = new \PDO('sqlite:/path/to/botdb.sqlite3');
$token = 'YOUR_ACCESS_TOKEN_HERE';

$bot = new TelegramBot($dbh, $token);

// adjust the bots defaults to your need.
$bot->setWelcomeMessage('Moin!');
$bot->setStopMessage('Ciao.');

Getting updates via webhooks (recommended):

Setup of webhooks (you only need to this once or after changes):

// set webhook
$bot->setWebhook('https://example.org/someobscurefolder/webhook.php');

// some other useful stuff
// remove webhook
$bot->deleteWebhook();

// get infos about configured webhooks
echo $bot->getWebhookInfo();

Put this in the file /someobscurefolder/webhook.php (don’t name it like this 😉):

// process update from webhook
$update = json_decode( file_get_contents("php://input"), true );
echo $bot->processUpdate($update);

Getting updates via polling

Run this periodically:

// process Updates in case not using webhooks
$bot->processUpdates($bot->getUpdates());

Sending Messages

The second parameter allows you to identify a sent message afterwards.

// send broadcast to all users
$bot->sendBroadcastMessage('Hello from <b>'.date('H:i').'</b>', '');

Editing and deleting messages

You can also edit and delete broadcasted messages. To do so, you need to pass a parameter that identifies the sent messages and allows the library to memorize the chat_ids and message_ids.

The following example shows a broadcasted, self destructing message (the edit and delete commands do not need to be executed on the same instance of TelegramBot since the data is written to the database and therefore persistent):

$seconds = 30;
echo $bot->sendBroadcastMessage('self destructing in '.$seconds.' seconds', 'some-arbitrary-string') . ' abonnierte Chats';
while($seconds > 0) {
    sleep(5);
    $seconds -= 5;
    $bot->editBroadcastMessage('self destructing in '.$seconds.' seconds', 'some-arbitrary-string');
}
echo $bot->deleteBroadcastMessage('some-arbitrary-string');

Dealing with commands

Let Telegram clients know what commands your bot understands (again as webhooks: you need to do this once or after changes):

$commands = [
    [
        'command'=>'start',
        'description'=>'starts bot'
    ],
    [
        'command'=>'stop',
        'description'=>'stops bot'
    ]
];
$bot->setMyCommands(json_encode($commands));

If you want to implement your own command, the easiest way to do this is extending the use TelegramBot class. In this little example we add a commad that echos the message:

class AdvancedBot extends TelegramBot {
    protected function executeCommand(string $command, array $update) : bool {
        $id = $update['message']['chat']['id']??'';
        switch ($command) {
        case 'echo':
          $message = \json_encode($update, JSON_UNESCAPED_UNICODE | JSON_PRETTY_PRINT);
          return $this->sendMessage('<pre>'.htmlspecialchars($message).'</pre>', $id);
        
        case 'rickroll':
          return $this->sendMessage('<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLzxrzFCyOs">Very important information</a>', $id);

        default:
          // let the parent method deal with commands like /stop /start
          return parent::executeCommand($command, $update);
      }
    }
}

// of course you need to instantiate and use your new class and not the old one...
$bot = new AdvancedBot($db_handle, $token)