Telegram Bots Every Bot Developer Should Know

Building a Telegram bot is mostly ordinary programming — plus a pile of small chores that have nothing to do with your code: registering the bot, hunting down numeric chat IDs, guessing why an update doesn't look the way the docs promised. Each of those chores already has a bot that solves it in a couple of messages. Here is a toolbelt organized by task.

Create and configure your bot

Everything starts with BotFather, the official bot for creating bots. Send /newbot, pick a name and a username, and it hands you the API token your code will use to talk to the Bot API. You will come back to it regularly: /setcommands sets the command menu users see, and it also manages the bot's descriptions and web apps. Keep the token secret — whoever has it controls your bot.

Find chat and user IDs

Sooner or later you need a numeric ID: Bot API calls take a chat_id, admin allowlists are lists of user IDs, and half of all debugging starts with "which chat did this update actually come from?". GetIDs Bot answers most of it: forward any message to it and it shows the Telegram-internal metadata — the sender's user ID, the origin chat, media info, and even an estimate of the account's age.

When all you have is a username, IDBot turns it into a numeric ID — it works for users, groups, channels, and bots alike. Chat ID Echo does the same job in the quickest possible form: send a username or forward a message and the numeric ID comes back instantly.

Inspect raw updates

When your handler misbehaves, the fastest fix is to look at the exact JSON Telegram sends. Show JSON Bot displays the raw JSON of any message you send or forward to it, so you can inspect every field of the message object. JSON Dump Bot does the same for the full Bot API representation: send it a message and read the update exactly as your webhook would receive it. Both are great for untangling entities, reply structures, and media fields without adding a single log line to your code.

Notifications and glue

Two bots keep an eye on things around your project. GitHub sends notifications about events in your public repositories straight to Telegram, and your replies are posted back as comments — you can work through issues without leaving the chat. DR Track watches the Ahrefs Domain Rating of your domains and pings you when it changes — useful when your bot has a landing page whose SEO you care about.

A feedback bot without writing code

Every bot needs a support channel, and you don't have to code one. Livegram Bot connects a bot you create in BotFather to your own account: users write to your bot and their messages land with you — a feedback bot is up in minutes without a line of code. And for the odds and ends, keep Telegram X Bot around — a grab-bag of utilities covering user ID lookup, account info, and message formatting help.

Most of these bots take less than a minute to try. More tools are in the Developer Tools category.