telenode-js

Telenode

Lightweight Telegram API framework for Node.js

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Features

✅ Explicit messages handlers
✅ Fallback messages handler (empty string)
✅ Regex matching on text messages
✅ Buttons support (inline keyboard, reply keyboard and remove reply keyboard)
✅ Secret token support
✅ Long polling support

Getting started

Installation

npm install telenode-js

Install dependencies

In order to reduce the node_modules size dotenv (for environment variables) and express (for local development / deployment) packages are defined as devDependencies.

You don't have to use these packages if you don't want to, and you can use them only for local development if you choose so.
If you do choose to work with these packages, install them manually:

npm install express dotenv

Or for serverless deployments install express as a dev dependency (to use in your local development environment) instead:

npm install express --save-dev

Set webhook

In order to listen to updates from Telegram servers you have to set up a webhook.
To use the npx set-webhook command you should provide the webhook parameter and api token. You can do that by:

1. Setting the WEBHOOK and API_TOKEN environment variables (SECRET_TOKEN is optional).
2. Storing them in .env file (SECRET_TOKEN is optional).
3. Use the --apiToken and --webhook command arguments (--secretToken is optional).

You also can provide the secret token parameter if you choose to.

Then you can execute the following command:

npx set-webhook

Long polling

If you prefer to use long polling method over creating a server with webhook you can use the startLongPolling method instead of createServer.
The method accepts pollingDelay - a number that represents milliseconds (must be at least 50ms).
By default the long polling mechanism will ignore all previous updates (cleanPreviousUpdates by default is true). You can toggle off cleanPreviousUpdates if you want to by setting it as false when you call startLongPolling.
You also can stop the long polling while it's running by setting bot.useLongPolling to false.
You can view an example of long polling usage here.

Note that long polling is usually not recommended and webhook is preferred for most use cases.

Usage

const Telenode = require('telenode-js');
require('dotenv').config();

const bot = new Telenode({
	apiToken: process.env.API_TOKEN,
});

bot.createServer(); // spins up an express server

bot.onTextMessage('hello', async (messageBody) => {
	console.log(messageBody);
	await bot.sendTextMessage('hello back', messageBody.chat.id);
});

In this example the bot will listen only to 'hello' text messages and will respond to the user 'hello back'. Any other message will be ignored.

• Note that bot.createServer() method requires express, and we are using dotenev as well which both are not installed automatically with Telenode.

Additional examples can be found in the examples folder.

Webhook security with secret token

You can secure your webhook with a secret token via the setWebhook method. You can do that by creating a SECRET_TOKEN variable in the .env file of your project (or environment variable) and run the npx set-webhook command. The command will tell Telegram servers to send the secret token in each request to your webhook as x-telegram-bot-api-secret-token header.

In order for the bot to use the secret token you need to pass to the Telenode class you instanciate the secretToken parameter.

You will have to pass a secretToken parameter to the telenodeHandler method as well.

You can pass a third parameter called unauthorizedCallback - a callback that will fire in case the request wasn't authorized.

You can find the example in the secretToken.js example and the implementation in src/server.js as well.

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Run feature examples:

After you have set your webhook you can play and test the Telenode features.

Each feature of Telenode is demonstrated in an example file inside the examples folder (inside node_modules if you installed Telenode).
You can run an example from the telenode-js directory inside node_modules by using the command:

npm run dev --file=<example>

You might need nodemon and dotenv installed as dev dependencies to run the examples with the command above.

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Deployment:

Since these days it is common to use serverless backend services, you can choose how the bot will work - or with express or with the HTTP engine of the serverless provider.

In order to spin up an express server you should use the command bot.createServer() - this is useful for deployments on VMs / containers / on-premise.

You can pass an object as options for createServer. Currently, it supports port and unauthorizedCallback (if you use secret token) - e.g:

bot.createServer({ port: 4000 }) // the default is 3000

In the other hand, if you want to deploy on serverless backend you need to use bot.telenodeHandler method and pass to it the request object. You will probably have something like this:

functions.https.onCall((req, res) => {
    const secretToken = req.headers['x-telegram-bot-api-secret-token'];
    bot.telenodeHandler(req.body, secretToken, unauthorizedHandler);
    res.end();
});

Note that on serverless you should extract by your own the secretToken since every serverless service might process the req object differently.

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Contributions:

If you want to develop a new feature you should create an example file under the examples' folder that demonstrates how to use the feature.

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TODO's

• Direct respond function in message handler without passing chat ID
• Chat ID handlers
• Arguments validations
• Optimize Telegram API requests
• Support edit reply markup
• Add extra security with query params token
• Add tests