Creating an echo bot in Telegram is so simple that it’ll take you less than 15 mins. 🚀

Start a conversation with the BotFather

Search for @BotFather in Telegram and press start. The BotFather will respond to you with a list of commands.

Create a bot and get your access token

Click on /newbot command in the message or from the menu and answer a few questions to the BotFather.

In the end, you’ll receive an authentication token for your bot. Save it and keep it safe with you.

Create a webhook using FastAPI

Create a file named main.py and copy paste the following code and replace then TOKEN with the access token you received from the BotFather.

import httpx
from fastapi import FastAPI, Request


TOKEN = "your_bot_token"
BASE_URL = f"https://api.telegram.org/bot{TOKEN}"

client = httpx.AsyncClient()

app = FastAPI()

@app.post("/webhook/")
async def webhook(req: Request):
    data = await req.json()
    chat_id = data['message']['chat']['id']
    text = data['message']['text']

    await client.get(f"{BASE_URL}/sendMessage?chat_id={chat_id}&text={text}")

    return data

This essentially uses FastAPI to create a POST endpoint in the path /webhook/ which will be called by Telegram whenever a new message is sent to the bot.

Every time Telegram sends an Update to the webhook, we get the text and call the Bot API using httpx to send it back.

Host it on your server

Host this main.py file to your server. There are several ways to do this. One of the most popular options is Deta.

They have a generous tier for individual creators and it’s very easy to deploy.

Test the webhook

Once it is deployed, you can test if the webhook is working by calling the API with the path {BASE_URL}/webhook/ from a client like Postman or Insomnia.

If everything is fine, it will return back whatever you had in the request body.

Set the webhook URL for the bot

Once you confirm the webhook is working, you need to set it up as the webhook URL for your bot.

You can do this by calling the setWebhook method:

https://api.telegram.org/bot{YOUR_TOKEN}/setWebhook?url={YOUR_WEBHOOK_ENDPOINT}

And that’s it!

You can now open the bot and send messages to it. It will echo everything that it receives. And then you start adding meaningful functionality to your bot.