So many applications and processes involve notifications. As we begin to automate processes, it becomes increasingly important to know if tasks we’ve initiated succeeded or not. That’s where automated notifications come into play. In my case, often times, these take the form of chatbots that send messages to let me know that something happened, or that a process either succeeded or failed.
I’ve settled on Telegram as my platform of choice for this. What’s attractive about Telegram? It’s available for a wide variety of platforms – iOS/iPadOS, Android, macOS, Linux, Windows, there’s even a web client.
So, how does one create a bot? You have a conversation with the BotFather. BotFather is a Telegram bot that creates bots (how meta, right?) for you. The bot walks you through the whole process. When the process is complete, you’re given a token – this is a secret value that serves as the “keys” to the bot. Once you’re done this process, you’re almost ready to start using the bot in your automations. Next, you start having a chat with the bot, just like you would with another human. Send the /start command to the bot to start it up. Once you’ve done that, you want to figure out the chat_id for that chat. This is pretty straight forward to do, fortunately.
To get the chat_id value for a private chat with your bot, you visit this URL:
https://api.telegram.org/bot[your-bot-token]/getUpdates
Want to use the bot to notify multiple people? Create a Group Chat and add the bot to it. Send a message to the group and reload that URL up above. Check the updates for the Group Chat messages, and look for the chat_id for the Group Chat in there. How can you tell the difference between a regular chat with the bot vs a Group Chat that the bot belongs to? Easy. All chat_id values are 32-bit integers, but Group Chats ID values are negative, while individual chats are positive. Easy, right?
Ok, so you’ve got the Token, and a chat_id value. It’s time to put those bits to work. Here’s an example, in Python, using the python-telegram-bot module, which you can install using pip install python-telegram-bot.
#!/usr/bin/env python3
import telegram
myToken = '123456789:ABC-123456-foobarbaz9876543210'
chatID = -123456789
bot = telegram.Bot(token=myToken)
bot.sendMessage(chat_id=chatID, text="Hello World!")
This is just one of many ways possible to send notifications. Find the one that works best for you and your workflows and go with it! If you want to take a shot at using Telegram, give their docs a read before you start.
Automating All the Things. 