Citation
BibTEX
@misc { npapadopoulos_notifications_using_telegram,
author = "Nikolaos Papadopoulos",
title = "Notifications Using Telegram",
howpublished = "\url{https://www.4rknova.com/blog/2023/04/05/telegram-notifications}",
month = "04",
year = "2023",
}
IEEE
[1] N. Papadopoulos, "Notifications Using Telegram",
https://www.4rknova.com, 2023. [Online].
Available: \url{https://www.4rknova.com/blog/2023/04/05/telegram-notifications}.
[Accessed: 01-03-2025].
In this short blog post, I experiment with using a Telegram bot to send arbitrary notifications as chat messages. There are many instances where this can be very useful. The process is fairly trivial, and it only takes a few minutes to set everything up.
Creating a Telegram bot
First we need to create a telegram bot. In telegram, start a new chat with @BotFather. This special account is a bot itself and facilitates the creation and management of other bots.
Issue the /newbot command and follow the prompts in the chat.
Once the bot is created, a token is issued. This token can be used to access Telegram’s HTTP API. Take a note of it as it will soon become useful.
Getting the Chat ID
Next we need to find our chat ID. This is easy to do when using Telegram’s web interface. Visit https://web.telegram.org and login. Once the interface is loaded, navigate to your contacts view via the main menu.
Find your name and click on it. Then, observe the url in the browser’s address bar. It will be similar to: https://web.telegram.org/z/#0123456789. The number at the end of that url is the chat ID.
Sending notifications
Following the steps described above, all the required information is obtained. Notifications can be sent using curl, with a simple POST request to Telegram’s API.
The following bash script demonstrates how that works.
#!/bin/bash
BOT_TOKEN="<replace-with-your-token>"
CHAT_ID="<replace-with-your-chat-id>"
MESSAGE="$@"
curl -s -X POST https://api.telegram.org/bot$BOT_TOKEN/sendMessage -d chat_id=$CHAT_ID -d text="$MESSAGE"
Example
Notifications can be issued by running the above script and passing a message as its input.
$ ./telegram_notify "hello world"
On the client side, a message should be received in a private chat with the bot account. This is what that will look like in Telegram’s Android application.
